[Chicken-hackers] some bio

[Thomas Bushnell BSG]

I should apologize for a bit of my usual coming-on-like-gangbusters
recently, and perhaps say a little of where I'm coming from.

I'm not a fan of r6rs; like a lot of people, I hung my head sadly when I
saw it.  I realized after a bit that a lot of what saddened me was
presentation; with the same ideas reorganized it was not so horrible.
At the same time, it is pretty bad, given the years I spent on the same
floor with the luminaries of Scheme and editors of r5rs, r4rs, r3rs,
etc.  I am at least pleased that it made a decent stab at solving the
eval problem, though it's not at all clear to me that the r6rs solution
is enough of an improvement over r5rs.

I'm uncertain whether I like syntax-case being in the standard; I have
never yet found a case where I was not quite happy with syntax-rules.

At the same time, I'm tremendously interested in practical programming.
Right now I'm working on a major project for my employer, using Scheme,
(with Scheme jobs--apply at www.borderstylo.com), and Chicken Scheme
absolutely thrilled me when I encountered it.  It takes seriously what
it takes to be a good compiler for Unixoid systems, has a splendid
implementation of call/cc (essential for me; I'm using it for cheap
threads), and an easy to use and complete foreign function interface.

I'm perfectly happy to put my time where my mouth is on implementation
things, and see contributing to the ongoing development of Chicken
Scheme as excellent for me and for my employer.  

My concern with r6rs is just what I said.  Still, if there is a draft of
r7rs (and let me say that the Steering Committee's membership certainly
promises a better standard than r6rs) I would love to see it.  Some
people's comments that r7rs will certainly be better make me wonder if
they know something I don't about how far along things actually are!

My other annoyance recently was the bit-set? problem.  Here I think it's
a no-brainer, but it's easy to avoid.  Of course, the cost of avoiding
it is to simply abandon the name entirely, since one can't be sure what
the unit system or the compiler is actually going to do with it.
Indeed, the egg documentation for srfi 60 says that bit-set? is just an
alias for the Chicken Scheme version, which, of course, it certainly is
not.  I suspect that nobody has actually noticed the difference.  At the
very least, can we add a note to the manual mentioning that the function
has opposite semantics from the one in srfi-60?

Thomas