[Scheme-reports] Ratification vote for R7RS-small

[Mario Domenech Goulart <mario.goulart@x>]

Full name: Mario Domenech Goulart

Location: Brazil

Statement of interest:

I've been using Scheme as my language of choice for some years now.
I've picked Scheme for its simplicity, consistency, elegance and
flexibility.  I use it professionally and for personal and open-source
projects.  I'm a member of the team which maintains CHICKEN Scheme.

I believe Scheme literally is a general purpose language and I find it
a shame that there are so many Scheme implementations but so few
real-world software written in it.

Vote: yes

Rationale:

I think R7RS-small is a nice move in the direction of interoperability
among Scheme implementations.  It makes standard common features that
implementations have been providing as extensions to the language.
That is handy and mostly harmless, since those features are so common
and generally useful, but often avoided because they are not standard.
Some would argue that some of those additions go against "programming
languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of
feature...", but I think the tradeoff is worth for practical purposes.

What some people pointed as a flaw I see as a virtue of R7RS-small: it
doesn't propose too many radical changes (taking R5RS as base here).
Changes are hard and should be gradually proposed, giving
implementations time to adapt without breaking too much code in short
periods of time.  I think the amount and nature of changes were
strategic mistakes of R6RS.

I really like the writing style of the draft.  It certainly makes the
specification a little larger in terms of number of pages, but it is
easier to read.


Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario

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