[r6rs-discuss] JAR statement

[Grant Rettke]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Brian Harvey <bh at eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>> One big group is users that care about records, a module system, and
>> Unicode in addition to R5RS. They are not language designers they are
>> users.
>> Another big group cares about research (theory, implementation, and so
>> on?); language design, these are the experts.
>> Should there be one language for both?
>
> As others have said, this seems like a funny way to divide us.  I view
> myself as a Scheme user, not a theoretician and certainly not an implementor,
> but couldn't care less about records or modules, still less Unicode.  I care
> about teaching students the power of the idea...
>
> If there's a division, it's probably between industrial users and academic
> users.  Maybe implementors are a third camp; I'm not sure.

That is my feeling; though I didn't elaborate on it in the email. I
hear that R3RS or R5RS are perfect for doing the job you describe and
that it serves one big sub-community in Scheme. Scheme has these
diverging communities with very different needs.

When I was talking about implementers as a community; that had to do
with voting and the power of the vote. In R6RS I read about Dybvig
objecting to records in the past due to implementation concerns. So
had he voted against R6RS because of that, and I had voted for R6RS
because I wanted records; our votes would have two very different
weights. I can't appreciate whether records would ruin all
implementers implementations; I just want records.

> Should there be one language for both?  No; there should be Common Lisp for
> the industrial users and Scheme for the academic users.

Interesting! I feel like, if Scheme had a "industrial features" added
it would be perfect for industrial users. I don't want to use CL.

Do you think that they can be added without ruining the core?

Why not define the core plus the optional industrial add ons? Why
can't we have our cake and eat it too?

> Anyway, I'm glad to have precipitated some actual discussion -- it's been
> awfully quite on the list since the electors were invited to join it!  :-)

Thanks for elaborating Brian!