Christopher Oliver <oliver_at_fritz.traverse.net> writes:
> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry_at_piermont.com> writes:
> > I don't care *which* scheme gets pushed hardest, so long as the good
> > talent all starts hacking on and improving *it*. There aren't enough
> > of us to be able to support the Scheme of the Week phenomenon.
>
> Here, I completely disagree. If you look carefully, you find that
> each Scheme centers around one or two seminal thinkers in language
> design whether that be Jonathan Rees, Matthias Felleisen, Christian
> Queinnec or some other. These folk have definite ideas where they
> want to see things go. There is even division in the ranks of to
> R?RS group as I found when I discussed the print representation of
> the language with Kent Pitman. I do not believe resolving these
> things by political fiat is any way to promote this. Until there is
> a clear idea of technical correctness at a broad scale, homogeneity
> is a curse rather than a blessing. Were we unable to hack Lisp
> before CLTL or the ANSI draft?
I don't think you need to have separate implementations to support
experimentation in most cases. Let's take the case at hand; different
object systems and links to external libraries can be supported in one
implementation. I agree with your sentiment; let the best extensions
win.
There are some types of experimentation that might require separate
implementations, of course. Support for native threading and
compilation to machine code come to mind as examples.
I agree that one can not resolve the open issues in Scheme by fiat,
but I don't think merging implementations makes that problem worse.
And the cost of maintaining separate implementations is high.
-russ
--
"Unfortunately the only Windows feature inspired by Emacs was size."
-- Nick C. in alt.religion.emacs
Received on Mon Oct 05 1998 - 20:25:56 CEST