[gambit-list] Tangerine Edition penultimate report: how I voted, how you're voting

John Cowan cowan at ccil.org
Wed Jan 16 09:27:50 EST 2019


Well, there are two weeks to go on the Tangerine Edition ballot (cutoff is
12 noon UTC on Saturday, February 2).  So far, 18 people have voted,
including me.  For the Red Edition we had 30 voters, so I hope some of you
who haven't voted yet will take an interest and give us your views.
Remember that you don't have to vote on all issues: choosing "No vote" is
equivalent to abstaining, which does not affect the outcome, as votes are
decided by a majority of the votes cast.

As in the Red Edition, the choice of string library (issue #1) has been the
most controversial.  There was no majority vote cast in the Red Edition, so
the issue is being reballoted.  Currently, the index-based SRFI 152, which
is meant to be a simple basic string library, holds a majority position,
but only by a single vote.  There is a strong minority for the original
SRFI 13, which is a superset (with a few deviations) of 152.  SRFI 130,
which is cursor-based, has only a single vote.  Three write-in votes were
cast for SRFI 140, which I excluded from Tangerine because it provides
adjustable-length strings.  These, like all other features that can't be
implemented (at least minimally) on top of R7RS-small, have been postponed
to the Green Edition.  I voted for SRFI 152.

Issue #4, supplementing the Red Edition's SRFI 127 generators with their
dual, accumulators, is substantially beating the alternatives of status quo
and no library.  Issue #6 is about bitwise operations on integers, and the
comprehensive SRFI 151 is dominating the R6RS alternative.  The same thing
is happening with fixnums (issue #7) and flonums (issue #8), where SRFIs
143 and 144, both supersets of R6RS, are getting more support than the R6RS
alternatives. SRFI 160 is a superset of SRFI 4 that provides homogeneous
vectors (issue #10), and it too is winning, though by a lesser margin.
Surprising to me is that for the combinator-based formatting library (issue
#11), the combinator-based SRFI 159 is in a majority position over SRFI 48,
the traditional template-based (as in Common Lisp) alternative.
Essentially all the remaining issues are yes/no/abstain, and yes is
dominant all down the line, though a little less so for ratios (issue #13)
and exact complex numbers (issue #16).  I voted with the majority for all
of these except exact complex numbers.

So what is happening is that people are voting for more rather than less,
as with the Red Edition.  This encourages me that I'm going in a sensible
direction with the large language.

-- 
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
It was dreary and wearisome.  Cold clammy winter still held sway in this
forsaken country.  The only green was the scum of livid weed on the dark
greasy surfaces of the sullen waters.  Dead grasses and rotting reeds loomed
up in the mists like ragged shadows of long-forgotten summers.
        --LOTR, "The Passage of the Marshes"
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/gambit-list/attachments/20190116/6bfb4bb1/attachment.htm>


More information about the Gambit-list mailing list