On 7/10/07, William D Clinger <will at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> More than twenty years have passed since I wrote this [1]:
>
> Programming languages should be designed not by
> piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the
> weaknesses and restrictions that make additional
> features appear necessary. Scheme demonstrates that
> a very small number of rules for forming expressions,
> with no restrictions on how they are composed,
> suffice to form a practical and efficient programming
> language that is flexible enough to support most of
> the major programming paradigms in use today.
>
> I still believe that first sentence, and I still believe
> Scheme ought to demonstrate what is claimed in the second
> sentence, but the draft we are being asked to ratify does
> not always do that.
In my mind, the restriction on allowable macro literals, which
excludes ... and _, undermines the second claim and should be removed
from the draft. Some of consequences of this restriction have been
pointed out in the thread starting here:
http://lists.r6rs.org/pipermail/r6rs-discuss/2007-June/002784.html
In particular, the inability to write certain kinds of general
macro-generating-macros strikes me as a shame, aggravated by the fact
that the restriction exists without any motivation as far as I can
tell.
David
Received on Tue Jul 10 2007 - 17:25:35 UTC