
Final draft of R7RS – small Scheme standard - waterhouse
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/pipermail/scheme-reports/2013-July/003660.html
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bgruber
you may also want to see john cowan's presentation on R7RS-small last year to
LispNYC: [https://vimeo.com/29391029](https://vimeo.com/29391029)

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kogir
I'm new to LISP (only a little over a year) but I already feel the same way
about R*RS as I do about ANSI SQL: You'd be crazy to target it instead of
making the most of the runtime you've chosen.

Has anyone here ever deployed to multiple runtimes? Why did you do it? I'm
curious.

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JoachimSchipper
E.g. libraries that can be implemented in pure Scheme should arguably target
R*RS rather than any particular implementation, to save on reimplementation
efforts.

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bhrgunatha
Does anyone have any idea what the overall plan for Scheme is?

From what I understand R7RS small is aimed at being closer to R5RS while
avoiding the controversial things introduced by R6RS.

But what about R7RS large? What are the overall aims of that? Has that been
decided yet?

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zeckalpha
My understanding is that would be R8RS, and would be a continuation of R6RS.
They seem to be doing the tick tock sort of model of alternating focuses for
"releases".

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bhrgunatha
Thanks - in fact bgruber's video link above [1] about R7RS-small also includes
a section about R7RS-large too. I hadn't seen the video when I asked my
question. Basically another working group will work out the details at a later
date and it will be much larger - about 80 packages and probably bigger than
Common Lisp according to the video.

[1] -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6000829](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6000829)

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nickmain
Is anyone here planning an implementation ?

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muuh-gnu
It is the Scmeme way: You'll quickly see half a dozen of different and
incompatible implementations, but not a single newsworthy project on top of
them. And soon after that, they will get bored and start yet another cycle of
speciation.

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d0m
The goal of the R7 is to avoid this. You could read the article and the spec
before saying sneaky comments like this.

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muuh-gnu
It was R6's goal also. But it didnt accomplish the stated goal but just
introduced more incompatibility into the overall Scheme ecosystem. But instead
letting all implementations at least get up to R6, they now have R7 on the
horizon. They afre churning standards out more quickly as implementors can
implement them.

And frankly, I dont see what the point will be: R7 small is not much
differrent than R5, so it is kind of pointless. R7 big is as big as common
lisp, and very few implementations will have the resources and the willingness
to implement it and discard their current non-standard APIs they had for
years. And even if the majority of them manages to implement R7, they will
finally reach the point where Common LIsp was 1994, with no added value over
Common Lisp, provided of course they dont decide to obsolete R7 also and get
to R8 before that.

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norswap
So R6 is bad because it's a big departure from R5 but R7-small is bad because
it doesn't change much?

The point of R7 is to make it is easy for implementation to upgrade from R5
after the controversial R6.

Ideally, most of the libraries in R7-big will be able to be written mostly in
R7-small. If they are smart, they'll make a R7-big FFI library, and then every
other library can be written in R7 + C.

This means an implementation would only need to implement R7-small and would
get all the libraries of R7-big for free.

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procrastitron
Can someone familiar with the process explain where this lies in the
standardization process?

Does "final draft" mean this is the official R7RS-small standard, does it mean
this is the final text being sent to the steering committee for endorsement,
or does it mean something else entirely?

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waterhouse
_this is the final text being sent to the steering committee for endorsement_

I think that is correct. The Working Group had put up draft 9 for public vote,
which (narrowly) made the 85% ratification requirement set by their charter.
There was a final objection made by Gerald Jay Sussman, whose opinion carries
a lot of weight when it comes to Scheme... The WG voted unanimously for a
change that addressed his concerns, and the Steering Committee approved the
making of this change, after which we had this tenth draft. I do believe the
WG is done with it. Therefore it seems basically set in stone, unless the
Steering Committee edits it, which seems to me outside the scope of what they
do (although I don't feel I completely understand how this works).

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davorb
Can someone sum up the major changes?

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zeckalpha
Don't think of 7 as being after 6. It is more of a continuation of 5, a
smaller standard with fewer bells and whistles. Due to this, a summary of
major changes may not be appropriate.

~~~
ArtB
I thought it was going to have a small and large version within it?

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UNIXgod
This is very exciting!

