Re: [Chicken-hackers] Made a start with CHICKEN 5 proposal

[Oleg Kolosov]

On 08/23/14 19:35, Peter Bex wrote:
> Hello hackers!
> 
> I've made a start on the wiki, at what we'd like CHICKEN 5 to be about.
> Please, do not make this into another "pony page", only add things that
> we really need to look at which require a rework in core which may be
> backwards-incompatible.
> 
> http://wiki.call-cc.org/chicken-5-roadmap
> 
> I already fear I may have gone a bit overboard with adding too many
> things I'd really like to see myself :)
> 
> I'd especially appreciate feedback on the core library names and
> the things to kill from core.  I will be expanding this page over the
> next few days/weeks.
> 
> Cheers,
> Peter
> 

I have a few questions:

Is there a way to get rid of ##sys# prefix everywhere? It might be
matter of preference, but it makes the sources harder to read.

Regarding continuations I think that call/cc is an advanced feature
people brag about when advocating Scheme but not so useful in practise.
So a "better API" is just TL;DR for most. Isn't the new API makes life
easier for implementors too? And benefit greatly from direct support
from performance standpoint. Especially considering that
handle-exceptions form essentially combines capture and graft in an
ad-hoc manner. So maybe we could go other way and define call/cc in
terms of capture and return just as in Feeley paper and discourage it's
usage in favour of simpler API.

Mentioning exceptions, I find whole SRFI-12 quite useless - it's just
too clunky to use. And looking at newer proposals I find it
disappointing that Scheme community, given it's rich computer science
heritage, haven't produced anything better than condition properties. I
still want to research the topic a bit more, and studying other
implementations, maybe someone could help me with some links or examples
of interesting solutions of the problem?

Regarding egg versioning, let's make CHICKEN itself a dependency too,
with the default (if not declared) to <= 4. This way the egg authors can
clearly declare which releases they support.

-- 
Regards, Oleg