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Scheme pre-R6RS Workshop at ICFP - What is the Point?
I agree with Kent. Before we start talking about R6RS, I'd like to have
some more concrete idea about where Scheme thinks it is going.
The workshop web page explicitly excludes several things that we really
need to talk about. What good is it to talk about records again? We first
voted down a record proposal 10 years ago. I have not seen a significantly
-different- record proposal in all the years since then, and I can recite
all the arguments pro and con, and explain all the interactions between
records and the debugger, records and read & write, records and objects,
records and exceptions, records and modules, records and types, records and
the foreign function interface, etc. Why should I travel to Baltimore next
September to go over it again?
Before I spend any more effort (and money) discussing records, exceptions,
modules, objects, binary I/O or Unicode characters, I would like to know
more about what our -goals- are, and about the -process- we plan to use to
achieve them. Do we want Scheme to remain a teaching/research language
that can only be used for real-world programming with great difficulty? Or
can we come up with some way to satisfy both camps? Do we want to change
the way language decisions are made? Abandon consensus? Do everything
under the IEEE process? Appoint a Scheme Czar? Freeze the language and go
home?
If we cannot talk about these political issues in Baltimore, then perhaps
we can talk about them here on rrrs-authors -before- Baltimore.
- Alan