[r6rs-discuss] [ANN] scheme-reports.org

[Thomas Lord]

On Mon, 2009-08-24 at 14:51 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Thomas Lord scripsit:
> 
> > Why not just stick to the much simpler REQUIRE and use naming
> > conventions to distinguish exported from internal definitions in
> > a library?
> 
> Naming conventions collide: some day there may be more than one Tom Lord
> writing Scheme code.  Name prefixing puts the library *user* in control
> of the conventions rather than the library author.  (The other import
> specifications, "only", "except", and "rename", support trivial special
> cases: I wouldn't die to see them go.)

Ah.  I just stupidly skimmed too quickly over the chicken
docs you pointed me at and missed that it does import
renaming/aliasing (with "prefix").  Sorry for the noise.

So, yeah, the Chicken module system has the advantages
you describe over just require/provide.

I still say it's too big for small scheme (and too
small for big scheme).   In small scheme without it,
you could implement something very close to it in a
library, as syntax.  You'd wind up with something that's
more flexible (e.g., permitting open-ended ways to have
multiple instantiations of a given "module").


> > There's nothing "of the essence" about the chicken module system.
> > I presume it works very nicely in the context of Chicken but it seems
> > kind of redundant and ad hoc and it adds implementation complexity -
> > all of which I think disrecommends it for small Scheme.
> 
> There's nothing "of the essence" about map and for-each either, but we
> don't want to give them up.

Oh, I wouldn't mind seeing map and for-each pushed
off to libraries.  Not at all.  Now that you mention it
it sounds like a good idea.  I'm not sentimental.

You (separately) asked what characters from ASCII I
would omit requiring:  any that aren't part of the 
lexical language, is the answer.

I'd (personal preference) like small scheme to be 
something that can run on a 1-watt, low-memory
system in, say, a light switch.  I'd like to be able
to use it in situations where I'm never going to 
load it up with more than a few lines of code (and
couldn't, even if I wanted to).  But the small scheme
standard tells me what those few lines of code mean.

By "of the essence" I mean that I just want the
definition of small scheme to capture some basic
properties of lambda and some invariants for basic
data types and a some minimal form of syntactic
extensiblity (hygiene not being high on the priority
list but flexibility is).

Heck, let's push AND/OR/IF/COND etc. off to a 
library.   Most every implementation will likely
have them built in, and that's just fine, but...

Something like the core language to which Rabbit
reduced all syntax...

-t