"Its the little things that count. Hundreds of 'em." -- Cliff Shaw

[mkatz@sesame.stanford.edu (Morris Katz)]

   Date: 22 Mar 89 21:50:21 PST (Wed)
   From: kend%mrloog.la.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET


   Ken Dickey:---(New)--------------------------------------------------V

(text ommitted)

   There are many people like myself who are in a commercial environment and
   wish to use Scheme.  Unless Scheme can be shown to be a portable language
   which tackles commercial problems we are condemned to use C++ or some
   other abomination.  It is my belief that if the above issues are not
   addressed in the IEEE Scheme Standard, usage of the language will be
   crippled.  Standardizing interfaces to functionality which has existed
   for some time in many implementations in a non-binding appendix seems to
                                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   me the most conservative way of doing so.  Conditional compilation
   /interpretation in some form seems to be the major piece of work, but I
   see it as crucial to the success of the Scheme language (I am not giving
   up my evenings doing this just to get flamed).

   -Ken			kend@mrloog.LA.TEK.COM

There is no such thing as a non-binding appendix as far as I am concerned.
A non-binding appendix is a little like saying stdio isn't part of C.
Kernighan and Ritchie make this distinction in "The C Programming Language",
but from a practical standpoint it is moot.  What are those in favor going to
say if in 6 months a group of us want to change the definitions in the
non-binding appendix in order to make what we believe are improvements?  If you
can honestly say that I will not here any objections on the grounds that we
have already published a different version, then I guess the appendix really is
non-binding; however, I seriously doubt this.  I suspect that it is time for
those of us who are interested in programming language development, as opposed
to product support, to go off and work on another language and let you codify
Scheme. 

					Morry Katz
					katz@polya.stanford.edu