De Facto Standards -- Revised straw proposal for heuristic info

[Alan Bawden <Alan@lcs.mit.edu>]

   Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 13:47:42 +0000
   From: William D Clinger <will@ccs.neu.edu>
   ...
   If you are objecting to this process, you're about ten years
   too late.

I'm not objecting to people binding R4RS together with various other texts
at all.  That was not my point.  What I object to is anything that might
create a de facto standard that will be extremely difficult to retract in
the future.  Your suggestion that someone take your "heuristic info"
specification and "bind it together with the R5RS" and then "take whatever
flack the R*RS authors might give them" is just another step towards making
something that looks, walks and quacks like a standard.

I do apologize for my "Wink, wink, nudge, nudge" message.  I should know
by now that attempts to use sarcasm in electronic mail invariably misfire
somehow.  In this case I was apparently taken to be raising some specific
objection to some forms of reprinting R4RS.  Actually I was trying to
continue to raise the alarm about the apparent transfer of effective
control of the Scheme standard from a diverse group of users, academics and
implementors, to a small group consisting of a few large implementors.

Now maybe such a transfer of control would be a good thing.  If that is
really what people want to do, then I would like to see us enter into that
new era with our eyes open.  Not by backing into it by accident, which is
what seems to me to be happening here.

I'll be in Philadelphia for ICFP next weekend.  I look forward to many
heated discussions with you all...

				- Alan