[gambit-list] My R6RS vote

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Mon Aug 13 21:57:52 EDT 2007


On 13-Aug-07, at 5:42 AM, Marijn Schouten (hkBst) wrote:

> Marc Feeley wrote:
>> The Scheme community will fragment and Scheme innovation will  
>> slowly die.
>
> Are we not already fragmented?

I should have said "fragment more".

>
> There is no agreed upon standard way to even load SRFIs.
>
> SRFI-55 [http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-55/srfi-55.html] defines
> require-extension to provide this functionality. Below you will  
> find a simple
> test. Note in particular that Bigloo, Gambit and MzScheme all fail  
> to provide
> this functionality, just like ELK, mit-scheme and scm. Only  
> Chicken, Gauche,
> Guile and stklos pass. I was under the impression that R6RS aimed  
> to solve
> this problem (but I may be wrong) and I am willing to swallow  
> whatever else
> has been put in if it does.

You seem to believe that if R6RS is ratified, whatever it specifies  
will be adopted by the above Scheme implementations and that this  
will allow users like you to write libraries that are portable to all  
those implementations.  But Bigloo, Chicken, Gambit, ELK, MIT-scheme,  
SCM and STklos will almost certainly not adopt R6RS.  So currently  
SRFI-55 is even more portable than I expect R6RS will ever be.

Note that SRFI-55 works fine with Gambit if you load syntax-case  
first, like this:

% gsi -e '(load "~~/syntax-case")' -e '(load "srfi-55.scm")' -

A simple change to the reference implementation (replacing define- 
syntax by define-macro) will make it work without having to load  
syntax-case.

Marc




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