Re: [Chicken-users] which RxRS?

[John Cowan]

Giorgio Flaverli scripsit:

> I've gradually lost touch with Scheme after the R6RS debacle. It was
> a sad day to witness the victory of the pushers of complexity, helped
> along by a large number of well-meaning morons who should never have
> been allowed in the "electorate" given that they never even came close
> to implementing a meta-circular. I wonder how much more successful
> Scheme could have been without this disaster and without the harmful
> actions of those individuals who caused it.

This is excessively harsh and downright insulting language.  R7RS-small
is, I believe, a substantial improvement over R5RS, but it could not have
been achieved so easily and completely without R6RS first paving the way.
R6RS provided a model of what standards can aim for as well as what they
should not aim for.

For example, the R7RS-small committee adopted the R6RS exception-handling
system unchanged, but rejected the R6RS condition system because it was
backward incompatible with all existing condition systems.  The spirit
of the R6RS library system informs that of R7RS, though there are
differences in detail.  A vast number of minor R6RS improvements were
added to R7RS-small, leaving out those that we thought would do more to
confuse users than to clarify R5RS.

Although R7RS-large will not be backward compatible with R6RS, and will
be a mix-and-match standard with most components optional, the choices
made in R6RS will continue to influence it.

Lastly, I was one of those who voted Yes on R6RS, not as an implementer (I
am not) but as a user.  I favored it not because I thought it was ideal,
but because I thought it was a reasonable compromise.  All standards
are compromises, and the purpose of the process is not to produce the
best possible result, but the best result possible in the circumstances.

-- 
John Cowan <address@hidden>             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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