Re: [Scheme-reports] Draft 3 Comments: Chapter 1

[Eli Barzilay <eli@x>]

Yesterday, Denis Washington wrote:
> 
> Nice to see my name here! Now I'm finally a historic person. ;)

I can't tell if the "acknowledgments" section, and large parts of the
preceding "background" are written as a joke, as a very-un-subtle
commentary, or as pure flamebait.

A whole bunch of people are thanked, all the way down to such ancients
as Texas Instruments.  But the R6RS editors are nowhere to be found,
except for a *single* cite that comes from a preceding paragraph.
"Obviously" none of the work that has lead to some of the new things
in R6RS is mentioned, even when these things are used in the R7RS
draft -- most notably libraries (or modules or whatever they're
called).

But all of that is really unsurprising given the preceding description
of R6RS as a failure: "in a poll taken many Scheme implementors
reported no intention of updating to the new standard".  Where in
practice, counting *implementations* (as some religious people would
count beads) is a guaranteed way to to conclude that R3RS is the most
widely adopted report.  Slightly further down, we're told that "the
Scheme Steering Committee decided to divide the standard into two
separate but compatible languages", forgetting the fact that this was
a revised steering committee.

History can be very nice when properly cencored.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!

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