A Minimalist Standard

[Don Oxley <oxley%home.csc.ti.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

I fundamentally agree with the minimalist notions.  My point is that I
would rather provide a mechanism to track "popular" but non-standard
features (such as multiple values) in such a way that users who use
such things have a reasonable method for learning their definition,
that there be only one, and that the chosen names not preempt the use
of that name in an eventual standard.  In NCS today, we have preempted
"values", "eval", "syntax", "macro", ... to name a few.  My point is
that something simple like a prefix (eg. ncs-values -
non-conforming-scheme-values) would avoid preempting the identifier
values and would give me a reasonable chance of writing an automatic
parser to repair the damage if a standard is ever reached.

It seems to me that the key is allowing Scheme to be widely used, but
somehow controlling the defacto standardization through widespread
usage.  A purely minimalist approach seems unlikely to do that to me.

	--Don