[r6rs-discuss] [Formal] Allow compilers to reject obvious violations

From: Anton van Straaten <anton>
Date: Mon Feb 26 12:23:03 2007

[I am posting this as an individual member of the Scheme community. I
am not speaking for the R6RS editors.]

Arthur A. Gleckler wrote:
> We've already dropped one of the core features of the language, its
> REPL, from the specification.

I don't know that the REPL specification was so much dropped as
acknowledged to be mythical. That change does not seem to pose any risk
of affecting "the prototyping-friendly nature of the language", since
implementations with REPLs are unlikely to discontinue them.

> Let's not go any further and lose the
> prototyping-friendly nature of the language.

The formal comment which started this thread proposed that
"Implementations *may* reject a library or program prior to
execution..." As Kent later put it, "Then this reduces to a quality of
implementation issue---users can pick the implementation that most often
exhibits the behavior they like." If adopted, that approach would put
much of the discussion in the current subthread outside of the scope of
R6RS.

However, it's not clear to me from the current subthread whether anyone
is objecting to giving this much discretion to implementations, and
instead would like R6RS to either require or forbid aggressive early
error detection. If there are such objections, I suggest that they be
raised explicitly (apologies if they were and I missed them).

Anton
Received on Mon Feb 26 2007 - 12:22:12 UTC