Re: [Scheme-reports] [scheme-reports-wg1] Arthur Gleckler's rationales for 4th ballo votes

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x>]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Denis Washington <denisw@x> wrote:
>
> I wouldn't say that R6RS consists of multiple reports, but of multiple
> documents forming a single logical report; the naming scheme of these
> documents support this view. The point is that you still have to support the
> functionality in all documents to be an R6RS Scheme, while in R7RS, we have
> a separation in multiple conformance levels which is expressed by the split
> into two reports. Therefore, I'd call the reorganization in R7RS much more
> substantial, because it is not only cosmetic.
>
> So I'm not basing my argument against the "revision" term on some vague
> notion of edit distance, but on the fact that the upcoming reports present a
> substantial semantic restructuring in that they redefine what Scheme
> actually is - a "language tower" rather than a single language, if you will.

Technically, it has not been decided if we'll have a tower
at all - that's up to the work of WG2.  Although I mentioned
possible conformance levels, the chair of WG2 has said he
only wants libraries.

Regardless, the name of the product of WG2 is outside the
scope of the WG1 ballot in question - we're only comparing
the WG1 draft to previous reports.

And as Arthur says, the reports have always had varying
levels of conformance.  The big change came in R6RS,
where they attempted to _remove_ the levels of conformance,
by making all features mandatory and specifying formerly
undefined behavior.

-- 
Alex

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