[r6rs-discuss] JAR statement

[John Cowan]

[Note: quoted fragments have been reordered]

Brian Harvey scripsit:

> My own personal problem with the way Unicode was handled in R6RS
> is that it was the excuse for the imho disastrous shift to C-esque
> case-sensitive identifiers.

Hah?  Putting the cart before the horse.  Unicode identifiers matter
because non-anglophone programmers matter, and deserve equal respect

> as long as you don't do things like making identifiers case-sensitive,
> which is a radical piece of vandalism to the core.

If you accept the argument from equity for Unicode identifiers,
case-folding becomes a pain in the ass.  Post-Unicode languages have
universally abandoned it.

> Of course nobody likes "overbearing curmudgeons"; but if one were to use
> a different choice of language and call them "people with principles"
> our emotional response might be different.

"Overbearing curmudgeon" describes a behavior, "person with principle"
describes a basis for behavior.  One may be (and I hope I am) a PwP
without being an OC.

> IMHO Scheme has a noble, holy purpose: to embarrass the designers
> of other languages into reconsidering their accretions of features,
> and to teach budding computer scientists the virtues of parsimony.

FWIU, the original holy purpose of Scheme was to figure out how actors
worked, and the noble (or Nobel) discovery was that they worked the same
as lambdas.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
O beautiful for patriot's dream that sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears!
America! America!  God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!
        --one of the verses not usually taught in U.S. schools