rrrs-authors vs. scheme-standard

[jar@void.ai.mit.edu (Jonathan Rees)]

   Date: Wed, 1 Feb 89 10:01:58 PST
   From: Andy Cromarty <andy@ads.com>

   ... It seems that scheme-standard and rrrs-authors are being used
   almost interchangeably; in fact, several discussions have seemed to
   bleed over from one list to the other in mid-debate as if the
   distinction does not exist.  To the extent that you still are
   active in managing the rrrs-authors list, can you comment (perhaps
   publicly) on proper use of the lists or their composition?  Perhaps
   there's near-total overlap and it doesn't matter which we use, for
   example (even that would be useful information).

Rrrs-authors is an informal anarchic non-public discussion of what is
supposed to go into the next Scheme report.  Scheme-standard is for
discussing the IEEE Scheme standard, which is supposed to be "based on
the Scheme report".  The IEEE group decided at its first meeting not
to do language design.  In principle there should be no overlap
between the subject material for the two lists.

If the IEEE group wants to do anything other than subset the report,
then I expect it will submit its proposals to rrrs-authors for
discussion.  People who would desire to add any kind of new feature
(to choose one example at random: allowing the empty list to be
considered true) to the IEEE dialect should direct their proposals to
rrrs-authors, not scheme-standard, so that they can be considered for
the language on which the IEEE document is supposed to be based.  When
in doubt, send to rrrs-authors, or, if you're not on rrrs-authors, to
the Scheme list.

The editors of the IEEE draft standard have some small changes that
they would like to propose for the report.  Not to worry; those
changes will be forwarded to the rrrs-authors list in due time.

Of course, subsetting discussions can be quite heated, as those who
are on the scheme-standard list have recently observed.