[r6rs-discuss] meta r6rs

From: Thomas Lord <lord>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:07:07 -0700

Sam TH wrote:
> The second group (which hasn't made much of an appearance in the R6RS
> process) has been overtaken by events. The major Scheme
> implementations and communities had already decided the broad outlines
> of R6RS, before the editors even began their work. The time to oppose
> syntax-case, and modules, and Unicode, has now passed - they have been
> successful and widely adopted. The alternative to adopting them was
> adopting nothing.


I think that is wrong. You place Chicken in that "second group"
yet, by external appearances, Chicken *is* now a major Scheme
implementation (insofar as *any* Scheme implementation can
be designated as "major"). The folks behind the R6 effort might
benefit by paying more attention to it.




> The third group has been overtaken by different events. The Scheme
> community no longer consists of a small number of people, all of whom
> are associated with an implementation that they take part in, as it
> might have in 1992. Most people who use Scheme don't implement
> Scheme, they use it to write real programs. And they thus want
> Scheme, as a language, to evolve to help them write those programs.
> The production of a new language design, whether it is called Scheme
> or not, doesn't help them, since they've already chosen the language
> they want. What does help them is evolving the language they've got,
> and making it more portable and better-specified.

You nowhere explain why the SRFI process is not at least adequate
if not better suited for that process.



> These claims offer little consolation to the people who've been left
> behind by the decisions made by the R6RS committee, but they perhaps
> offer some explanation of why things have turned out as they have.
>

To explain "why things have turned out as they have" we would have
to turn to post-structuralist philosophy's of history, of a Foucault-like
nature. I'm game if you are. I would suggest we start by looking
at the technical term of art "language standard" to understand how it
functions in the contemporary discourse. A good place to begin might
be by identifying the point in history where that term first entered the
field of programming and to try to unearth records of the discourse
that surrounded that event.

-t
Received on Fri Jun 15 2007 - 16:07:07 UTC