[Scheme-reports] Fwd: ratification vote for R7RS-small

[Sam TH <sam@x>]

Full name : Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
Affiliation : Northeastern University

Vote: No.

Rationale:

1. The new standard is gratuitously incompatible with the current
standard for Scheme.  It is the job of standards committees to produce
compatibility and interoperability, instead this committee chose the
opposite route. For example, despite isomorphic features, the module
system is incompatible with the current standard.

2. The module system is pointlessly inflexible, and requires
additional boilerplate beyond that in R6RS and other existing
implementation-specific module systems.  Rather than lifting the
restrictions present in other systems, it adds more, necessitating
terrible additions such as include.

3. The draft leaves the semantics of the top level fundamentally
unspecified.  If this aspect of the charter cannot be portably
accomplished, it should not be standardized.  Simply describing a
feature without saying what it should do is not standardization.

Most significantly, the draft makes a concerted effort to avoid hard
decisions that might alienate any of the community [1].  As a result,
it is less of a standard than a description of the current balkanized
state of the Scheme community.  If real standardization of Scheme is
impossible, then we should avoid trying, just as we do not put effort
into a single standard describing both Scheme and Common Lisp.

[1] With the notable exception of the majority of the community that
favored R6RS.

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