[r6rs-discuss] Standard GUI Library

From: Jeff Read <bitwize>
Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 06:35:50 -0700

On 6/4/07, Erich Rast <erich at snafu.de> wrote:

> My (perhaps wrong) impression of the SRFI process was that it is only
> used for specifying standards implemented in Scheme, but that
> proposals that almost solely depend on external libraries or
> implementation extensions don't have a realistic chance of ever
> becoming a final SRFI.
>

A SRFI is what the acronym expands to: a request for implementation, a
formal specification of a feature you'd like Scheme implementors to
include.

SRFI 4 - Homogeneous numeric vector datatypes
SRFI 18 - Multithreading support
SRFI 19 - Time Data Types and Procedures
SRFI 22 - Running Scheme Scripts on Unix
SRFI 62 - S-expression comments

These are examples of SRFIs which are not, or have components that are
not, directly implementable in the R5RS dialect of Scheme. While the
SRFI editors ask for a reference implementation in some version of
Scheme to make implementors' lives easier, it is sometimes useful to
ask for a feature to be implemented that depends on operating system
services or external libraries, in which case the SRFI will have a
reference implementation specific to some Scheme implementation, or in
some cases, no reference implementation at all.

With that in mind, a SRFI (or set of SRFIs) for a GUI toolkit is
something I would consider to be enormously beneficial, at least to a
subset of the Scheme community. But I still think such a thing is well
outside the scope of the R6RS standardization process.

--Jeff
Received on Mon Jun 04 2007 - 09:35:50 UTC