Re: srfi-0 and srfi-7

> SRFI 7 is for writing portable programs based on specifications shared
> by multiple implementations.  Adding "MzScheme-specific" extensions
> defeats that goal, and SRFI 7 just isn't good at handling this case.

I think "defeats" might depend on whether you are talking technically or
politically.

Technically, it's just a namespace and syntactic conditionals.

> That of, course, is not only unportable now, it's also likely to make
> a program written and working now fail in the future.

I think I appreciate your point.  However, libraries, if useful, would
be actively maintained, and therefore could track the changing universe
of implementations.

There is just not enough person-power available to write excellent SRFIs
and implementations of same right now.  That reality cannot be forced
politically, because there is little leverage, and few agents to
influence anyway.

Also, in practice, portability abstractions that are expressive and
evolutionarily responsive enough to capture all the pertinent
information on which crucial implementation/portability decisions might
be made in programs-- are often impractical.  You start bumping into
intractable problems of ontology and decidability, and also get
maintenance nightmares of the type you were trying to avoid.

I think there should also be no reason, in a language with Scheme's
syntactic power, that I can't have a single source code file that
captures decisions I have made about how to get it to work well with
different extensions of several Scheme implementations.

If we want a commoditized, suffocating language, there is Python. :)

I think I can make my code much more portable and widely useful by
judicious reference to non-SRFI "features" than I can by imagining
standards and libraries that do not exist and that nobody has time to
write.

However, if I, and many other modest-contributors like myself,
eventually hit a critical mass of library usefulness, then maybe
sufficiently good portability abstraction libraries we need will get
written.

Right now, the Scheme universe consists of a few-dozen poorly-funded
research projects, pedagogical religions, and spare-time hobbies,
however, and SRFIs and their implementations are poor for much of what
they are supposed to be.


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