[r6rs-discuss] R5RS environments

From: R. Kent Dybvig <dyb>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 08:25:40 -0400

> Not that I care much about SCHEME-REPORT_ENVRIONMENT or
> NULL-ENVIRONMENT either, but isn't their
> purpose to be as backward-compatible as possible, ...

We could have required more backward compatibility but opted instead to
make the environments consistently bind the identifiers defined in the
r5rs report to the compile- or run-time values of their r6rs counterparts,
where r6rs counterparts exist.

The only other consistent treatment would have been to require all of the
bindings in these environments to have their r5rs values, and we felt that
would be too burdensome. For example, in the r5rs environment, internal
definitions would have to have letrec rather than letrec* semantics, real?
would have to return true for 1.0+0.0i, eqv? would have to work as it did
in r5rs on complex numbers and procedures, read would have to be case
insensitive, and all of the effect-only procedures and syntactic forms
would have to return exactly one value, even if an implentation's r6rs
counterparts return, say, zero values.

Furthermore, the r5rs environment would have become inconsistent with what
one could build by importing selected bindings from the r5rscompat and
r6rs libraries. For consistency, we'd therefore have had to make r5rs
much larger to incorporate r5rs bindings for anything that changed between
r5rs and r6rs.

A better solution might have been to omit the scheme-report-environment
and null-environment procedures from the report and wait for someone to
provide truly backward-compatible versions as a portable library. Perhaps
someone will do so anyway.

Kent
Received on Mon Sep 24 2007 - 08:25:40 UTC