[R6RS] Goals

[Marc Feeley]

The (draft) charter for Scheme standardization indicates the following
four goals:

  1) Produce a core Scheme specification.  The new core must include
     a mechanism for user-defined datatypes (and fix other things).
  2) Define a module system.
  3) Define a macro system to supplement or replace SYNTAX-RULES.
  4) Designate library modules.

We need to make these goals more precise, as they are currently rather
abstract (probably on purpose).  Personally I think this list is still
very preliminary and we need to come up with a more concrete list of
issues to work on.

I would like to ask everyone of you to send a list of issues you think
need to be addressed in the R6RS design process, in other words what
features do you think we should consider adding/removing.  It doesn't
have to be proposals of specific changes, it could include general
issues that need to be addressed without proposing specific solutions.
In the interest of decorum, let's refrain from discussing these issues
at a technical level before we have collected a comprehensive list.
Once the list is collected, organized and prioritized we can start
discussing each issue in its own thread.

I don't expect each of our lists to be complete at first, it is easy
to forget some features or changes we've thought of in the past (at
least that is the case for me).  However we must make an effort to
have a fairly complete list early on to plan our design work.

Let's aim to achieve this over the next couple of weeks, at least for
the most important issues.

Marc