Re: [Chicken-users] which RxRS?

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

On 11/12/13 00:08, Giorgio Flaverli wrote:

[Ignoring the inflammatory stuff, I just want to clarify one point here...]

> Another problem: anything other than a small standard makes it hard to
> write Scheme interpreters "for everything". This was the amazing thing
> about Scheme. Want to drive your embedded system? Go ahead and embed a
> tiny scheme interpreter. Want to drive JVM code? Use KAWA or Sisc. Want
> to drive an Ocaml program? Embed OCS. R7RS-small might be good, but when
> lots people write R7RS-large code, and some write R6RS, a lot of code
> will be useless to minimalistic implementations.
> 
> Finally, it's sad that this whole disaster was fostered upon the
> community un-necessarily. There was absolutely nothing wrong with
> extending Scheme via the SRFI process, particularly on the library side.

That's what R7RS-large is, pretty much; identifying things we lack SRFIs
for and making them... R7RS-small is your minimal Scheme core that can
fit into tiny spaces, while still having the expressive power to run
portable reference implementations of SRFIs from R7RS-large.

Of course, some SRFIs are interfaces to platform-specific features such
as networking, that can't have a portable reference implementation, in
which case they still help people on embedded systems by providing a
standard interface (with reference code for the portable parts) to
whatever hardware features the platform provides.

R7RS-large will be a grab-bag of useful optional tools that can be added
to an R7RS-small implementation - by the user, if it can be done in a
portable library, or by the implementer, if an optimised implementation
using implementation-specific features is desirable or access to
platform-specific features is required.

So I think the fears above about the future direction of Scheme are
unfounded, and would like to make sure everyone is aware of that :-)

ABS

-- 
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/

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