Re: Duplication of effort.

From: Perry E. Metzger <perry_at_piermont.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 17:08:53 -0400

Harvey J. Stein writes:
> > > So, what's missing is a standard that's sufficiently rich to allow
> > > good work to be done in a C/unix/windows centric world. The issue
> > > isn't proliferation of incompatible implementations. The issue is
> > > sufficiently rich standards.
> >
> > You'll never get a sufficiently rich standard.
>
> Why? It seems that C was. All that's needed is a standard FFI for
> interfacing to C code. Then all the C libs/X/unix/everything else
> come in for free.

1) The C standard is pretty easy by comparison. All that is needed is
a definition of the ABI for function calls and you are pretty much
set.
2) In the scheme case, if you can actually manage the spec, and to get
it rigorous and interoperable, you have probably not only built a
couple of systems to use it but have put more work into the spec
itself than into any implementation of that spec.

Perry
Received on Tue Oct 06 1998 - 23:09:33 CEST