Re: [Scheme-reports] Formal Response #456: Adoption of R6RS

[Michael Sperber <sperber@x>]

John Cowan <cowan@x> writes:

> This is a Formal Response to Formal Comment #456:
>
> Adoption of R6RS
>
> This Formal Comment objected to the following passage in the Introduction:
>
>     The resulting standard, the R6RS, was completed in August
>     2007, and was organized as a core language and set of mandatory
>     standard libraries. The size and goals of the R6RS, however, were
>     controversial, and adoption of the new standard was not as widespread
>     as had been hoped.
>
> This has been tentatively replaced by the following:
>
>     The resulting standard, the R6RS, was completed in August 2007,
>     and was organized as a core language and set of mandatory standard
>     libraries. Several new implementations of Scheme conforming to it
>     were created. However, most existing R5RS implementations (even
>     excluding those which are essentially unmaintained) did not adopt
>     R6RS, or adopted only selected parts of it.

It still seems quite tendentious.  How can an "essentially unmaintained"
implementation be expected to implement a new standard?

Also, taking this list as a reference:

http://lists.r6rs.org/pipermail/r6rs-discuss/2007-October/003351.html

... these R5RS implementations did commit to implementing R6RS:

- Chez Scheme
- Larceny
- Racket
- Scheme 48 (I know, not done yet, but that's hardly a criterion)

R5RS implementations at the time from that survey:

- SISC
- Gauche
- Gambit-C
- SCM
- Stklos

There are a few close calls:

- There's Chicken, which still only supports "almost all of the R5RS
  Scheme".
- Kawa supports a lot of R5RS, but not call/cc and tail calls - arguably
  two crucial features.  On the above message, Per Bothner said "This is
  not a rejection of R6RS in principle [...]  but a fact of limited
  resources".
- MIT still "plans to finish support for R5RS".

I don't know how you want to count Guile.  Its home page currently says
"Guile is up to date with recent Scheme standards, supporting the
Revised5 and most of the Revised6 language reports."  I'd say that's at
least equivocal.

So the counts seem at least close: Depending on how you count 4:5 or
5:5.  At least 4 new implementations of R6RS have been created since it
came out.  If that's in any way empirically relevant ... well, be my
guest.

So one way to fix this is to spell out the numbers or the names of the
implementations.  However, it seems to me you want to talk about
community sentiment.  I have no objection to that, and certainly there
was a lot of discontent.  Why you don't you describe that directly
instead of trying desperately to find an abstracted fact to hang a
tendentious argument onto?

-- 
Regards,
Mike

_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
Scheme-reports@x
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports