[r6rs-discuss] What's up with the library names?

From: Anton van Straaten <anton>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 04:31:03 -0400

Brian C. Barnes wrote:
> I guess it really comes down to the question of whether or not the
> "standard" libraries will be stable enough (going forward, since libraries
> are new with this draft of the report) that having this kind of flexibility
> is useful.

Exactly. Other languages blithely use imports (or the equivalent) of
standard libraries without saying anything about versions, and rely on a
high-ish degree of backward compatibility being present in future versions.

Writing (rnrs base) is at least as sensible as the alternative:
specifying the (6) explicitly ought to be redundant in ordinary R6RS
code, unless you have some reason to know that you need to specify it,
which requires some knowledge of what e.g. R7RS will do.

It's more likely that explicitly specifying (6) in some cases could
become necessary under a future version, in order to obtain some
backward compatibility which the newer version libraries don't offer.

Anton
Received on Thu May 24 2007 - 04:31:03 UTC