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

From: Anton van Straaten <anton>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 13:25:24 -0400

Ludovic Court?s wrote:
> At any rate, it does seem harmful for a program to not specify which
> version of the report it is targeting since it may eventually break in
> unexpectable ways when the next report comes out.

This situation is the status quo in most programming languages.

No automatic feature alone is going to give you the ability to upgrade a
program to a new language version with perfect, guaranteed reliability.
  For any program which matters, it's necessary to test, research, and
often to make some changes to the program. Some of those changes might
involve specifying particular library versions to achieve necessary
compatibility.

It's likely to be at least as easy to add version specifications when
you find it's needed, as to do it in advance when you don't know
anything about the future version you're trying to protect against.

The real benefit of version specifications is to allow you to specify
the version compatibility of your programs and libraries when you have
actual knowledge of the versions that they can work with.

Anton
Received on Thu May 24 2007 - 13:25:24 UTC