Re: Libraries and repositories

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <address@hidden>]

Michael Vanier wrote:

> You don't like define-syntax, syntax-rules, syntax-case et. al.?  

Paul's talking about "the standard", which presumably means R5RS.
Perhaps you don't know this, but macros have been in discussion by the 
Scheme committees for over a decade.  Why?  Because two different
groups each felt they had The Right Thing -- and those happened to be
different Right Things.  It's bad enough to be held up because you
can't find one; it's much worse when you get held up because you did
find two. (-:

You blithely mention SYNTAX-CASE.  Yet SYNTAX-CASE (which I swear by)
isn't in the standard; the considerably older and more hobbled (fine
for its time, but superceded by SYNTAX-CASE) SYNTAX-RULES is.

>				  I don't think there's anything in the
> standard prohibiting defmacro-style macros, and most schemes seem to offer
> them. 

As the various other voices on this list have said (in various ways),
the problem isn't what the standards allow -- it's what they include.
Neither does the standard prohibit networking -- except each
implementation has a different networking library.  Standards are only 
as useful as the most useful entities they help you construct.  The
Scheme standards help you construct immensely useful and intricate
algorithmic descriptions; they don't help you structure programs or
parse SMTP headers.

Fortunately, the Scheme standardization process seems to effectively
be dead, so we needn't wait Godot-like for the proclamations of R6RS.

Shriram