[R6RS] Library syntax versioning

[Michael Sperber]

William D Clinger <will at ccs.neu.edu> writes:

> You characterized the encoding of libraries as MIME messages
> as an "alternative" to the <language> specification.  I don't
> want to have to write my portable Scheme code as MIME messages,
> however.  How is portable Scheme code supposed to specify the
> report-revision=6 stuff without using the MIME encoding?

Two things are getting conflated here: The notion of the code you
write and the notion of code that gets distributed to someone else.
SRFI 83 is for the latter.  I think you want to argue that, as this is
what the R6RS will specify, people will use the same notation to write
code.  That's OK, but in my mind, much less important.

Now, one of the purposes of the language specification is to specify
the syntax of the module language itself.  So far, it hasn't included
the lexical syntax, but (so I took it) some of us thought it might be
a good idea to cater to the possibility that the lexical syntax might
change as well.  This is difficult with the current SRFI draft because
the language specification is sitting inside an S-expression.  (It
might still be made to work, but that seems awkward to me.)  So
something outside at least the library form seems to be needed to meet
this requirement well.

As to writing code, could you say why you don't want to write the
following single line at the top of a file containing library module
specifications?  (OK, two: there has to be a blank line after it.)

Content-Type: application/x-scheme; report-revision=6

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla