[r6rs-discuss] R5RS is not a baseline

[Lynn Winebarger]

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Sam TH <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> and again:
>
>> Should there be one language for both?  No; there should be Common Lisp for
>> the industrial users and Scheme for the academic users.
>
> which makes it pretty clear that your goals do not coincide at all
> with mine, or with anyone else who wants this standards process to be
> primarily about creating a dialect of Scheme [1] for use in writing
> portable real programs.
>
> It's fine to have differing goals, but we need to be up-front about
> that fact.  If we pretend now that we all have the same goals, we'll
> be very disappointed later when it turns out that we have to choose
> between conflicting goals.

    Are the goals inherently incompatible (not the "academic users"
part, but the parsimony in language design part)?

Lynn