[MIT-Scheme-users] [Scheme Steering Committee announcements] R6RS Released

[Mitchell Wand]

On behalf of the Steering Committee and the Editors Committee, I am
extremely pleased to announce that the R6RS is now available in pdf
format at http://www.r6rs.org .

An HTML version will be available shortly.

The editors have asked me to include the following statement.

 The editors would like to make the following suggestion to the steering
 committee and, by extension, the Scheme community.

 Among the differences between the R6RS and its predecessors, the sheer
 size of the report is the most obvious.  This difference can be explained
 by the primary goal that drove the R6RS effort, which was to enable a new
 level of portability among Scheme implementations.  Given that goal, many
 language constructs that implementations supply out of practical
 necessity---including modules, records, expressive macro systems, byte
 vectors, hash tables, and exceptions---fell under the purview of the new
 report, instead of individual implementations.  The result is a
 significantly larger report.

 The expanded scope and size of the report make its compromises and flaws
 more keenly felt than before; quite simply, there are more details to get
 wrong.  Compromises and flaws are inherent in a standardization process,
 just as they are inherent in the production of software artifacts (at
 least given our current technology).  As with software, the clearest way
 forward is a process of continual refinement.

 We therefore suggest that the standardization process be refined to
 accommodate a series of incremental reports (R6.1RS, R6.2RS, etc.) to
 address problems in R6RS as flaws and their solutions become clear.

On behalf of the Steering Committee, I would like to thank all the
editors for their efforts over the last four years.  The scale and
length of this process is unprecedented in our community.  I would
also to like to thank the many people who contributed to the discussion
and participated in the R6RS process.

I will be giving a report on the process at the Scheme Workshop on
Sunday.  I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Sincerely,
--Mitch Wand

for the Steering Committee:
Alan Bawden
Guy Steele
Mitch Wand

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