[r6rs-discuss] What's up with the library names?

[Anton van Straaten]

Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> At any rate, it does seem harmful for a program to not specify which
> version of the report it is targeting since it may eventually break in
> unexpectable ways when the next report comes out.

This situation is the status quo in most programming languages.

No automatic feature alone is going to give you the ability to upgrade a 
program to a new language version with perfect, guaranteed reliability. 
  For any program which matters, it's necessary to test, research, and 
often to make some changes to the program.  Some of those changes might 
involve specifying particular library versions to achieve necessary 
compatibility.

It's likely to be at least as easy to add version specifications when 
you find it's needed, as to do it in advance when you don't know 
anything about the future version you're trying to protect against.

The real benefit of version specifications is to allow you to specify 
the version compatibility of your programs and libraries when you have 
actual knowledge of the versions that they can work with.

Anton