Re: [Chicken-users] Scheme is dead, long live Scheme

[Ivan Raikov]

>
> The language is massively fragmented already, so this is nothing new.
>
 
   Well, a few of the people who voted yes on the R6RS proposal seemed
to believe that the new standard will bring about better compatibility
between existing implementations. My point was that you cannot alter
the existing state of Scheme by the sheer force of willpower. 

>
> I prefer the view of the ANSI/ISO C standards committee:  "Old code
> is important; old implementations are not."  Even Sun has now been
> dragged kicking and screaming into the ISO C age.

   I most certainly do not consider ISO C or C++ to be good language
standards. In my opinion, a programming language standard should
encourage and support the proliferation of high-quality
implementations. For example, R5RS or the Standard ML
specification. The follow very different philosophies: R5RS is short
and laconic, and thus encourages experimentation; the Standard ML
standard contains a full formal specification of the language
semantics, and thus encourages consistency and correctness. Both
languages enjoy a variety of feature-complete high-quality
compilers. Compare with C++: despite the thousands of pages of
specification, I am not convinced that you can find two different C++
compilers that implement all features of the language in the same
way. Small specifications that only concern high-level semantics seem
to encourage higher implementation quality.


   -Ivan