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

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 10:11 AM, William D Clinger <will@x> wrote:

The Scheme Language Steering Committee (SLSC) is pleased to
request your vote on whether the ninth draft R7RS produced by
Working Group 1 should be endorsed by the SLSC. Your vote is due
by the end of Sunday, May 13, 2013.

Full name (required): Arthur A. Gleckler

Location (optional): Sunnyvale, CA USA

Affiliation (optional): Google Inc. (but I am voting on my own behalf)

Contact details (optional): scheme@x

Statement of interest (not required if you registered for the

R6RS ratification or the 2009 Steering Committee election):

Here's what I wrote in my R6RS voter registration:

I've been an avid fan of Scheme since 1984, when I first used it

as part of the 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer

Programs course at MIT. It has been my favorite programming

language since then, and while I rarely use it at work, I use it

for all my programming projects at home. While I was an

undergraduate, a staff member, and a graduate student at MIT

[TA-ing 6.001 three times], I spent many years working on MIT

Scheme, including its interpreter, compiler, runtime system,

debugger, and editor, and I continue to make small contributions

in my spare time. I've also spent a lot of time working on my own

unfinished implementation of Scheme. I followed the R4RS and R5RS

standardization processes closely, participated some in the IEEE

Scheme standardization process, and have participated quite a bit

by email in the R6RS process. I want to help make sure that R6RS

maintains the right balance between the diamond-like jewel Scheme

has always been and the practical everyday programming language

that we have always wanted Scheme to be.

Since then, I voted "yes" on R6RS, and I've been an active member of

R7RS Working Group 1 (WG1).

Vote (required): yes

Rationale (optional):

The Steering Committee began the R7RS process by dividing the

standard to be written into a "small" Scheme suitable "for use in

education, programming-language research, embedded systems, and

embedded scripting languages" and a "large" Scheme suitable for

large-scale software development. Here are the charters of the

working groups for the small and large languages:

<http://scheme-reports.org/2009/working-group-1-charter.html>

<http://scheme-reports.org/2010/working-group-2-charter.html>

Note the emphasis in the charters on making it possible to share

code between implementations. I'm a big fan of this division of

work, as it will help users of powerful implementations of Scheme

written in the spirit of R6RS -- ones that are suitable for

real-world, large-scale development -- share code with each other,

but it will also help users of much smaller, more special-purpose

implementations share code as well, and without burdening them with

the enormous implementation effort required by a larger standard.

The charters are also designed to ease moving code from small

implementations to large ones.

I am convinced that the draft is a big step forward, and that it

will form an excellent basis for small implementations and for the

larger standard that I hope to help write as a member of Working

Group 2. The draft includes a simple, static module system that

supports loading code defined outside the module declaration and

loading code written in case-insensitive R5RS Schemes; a simple and

already widely implemented records package; standard support for

parameter objects; important data types such as byte vectors; clean

support for binary and textual I/O; and numerous other improvements

that will help us share code between implementations both small and

large.

I'm eager to get on with the more exciting work of defining the WG2

standard, where we can draw upon much more of the work done in R6RS

and since. I want to help write a Scheme standard that makes it

easy to write and share Scheme code that can take advantage of the

broad array of language features and libraries needed for writing

substantial programs.