Re: [Scheme-reports] [r6rs-discuss] Fwd: [plt-scheme] [ANN] Scheme Language Working Groups 1 and 2 draft charters

[Brian Harvey <bh@x>]

Arthur, you didn't reply to the most important paragraph of Ray's message:

> It would not have been necessary to have more than one working
> group in the first place if subsetting were a viable approach.
> Rather, it would be appropriate for the working group to produce
> a document specifying some constraints as "optional", as was done
> in past RNRS reports. Indeed, this will be the net effect of the
> current effort if the draft WG charters are ratified and executed.

I think that the Steering Committee (amazingly, in my view) thinks that
R6-haters merely hate the weight of the standards document, and if we
could just leave out every other page, we'd have a nice WG1 Scheme.
It's not true.  At least it's not true for /this/ R6-hater.  For me,
R6 isn't just too much of a good thing; it's a huge step in a wrong
direction.  The SC set up two WGs because they recognize that my "wrong
direction" is other people's right direction.

For me, the paradigmatic issue is that the R6 people view the Lisp REPL as
an unnecessary frill -- well, let me not put opinions in other people's
brains and merely remark that they produced a document that makes proper
REPL support impossible.  I am sitting here right now banging my head into
the wall at the very thought of this!  And, no, it doesn't help to have two
modes.  It's vitally important that someone who has no idea that there's
such a thing as a compiler or a macro should be able to understand the
behavior of the language.  The only mode is REPL-compatible mode, even if
under the hood there's a brilliant compiler.  No R6-compatible implementation
can provide this behavior.

In my opinion Ray is 100% right.  If the two languages were compatible,
there wouldn't be all that blood on the floor.

PS The message from Ray to which you responded is /not/ the first commentary
on the WG charters!  (It may be that Ray was first, but not in that message.)
Please review the archives of the mailing list.  There has been lots more
detail about why the WG1 \subset WG2 approach can't work.


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