Re: Planned presentation at The Bazaar

[hjstein@bfr.co.il (Harvey J. Stein)]

Greg Harvey <Greg.Harvey@thezone.net> writes:

 > The problem with cl is that the standardization wasn't based so much
 > on refining the features of the language, as making sure that most of
 > what already existed in lisp implementations would still exist in
 > future implementations. A lot of vendors had vested interest here, and
 > the direction was more one of avoiding breaking existing code, rather
 > than making cl as consistant (syntactically, at least) as possible.
 > 
 > Scheme isn't really in the same boat, for a couple of
 > reasons:
 > 
 > 1) Any code that's been written for more than one implementation has
 >    basically stuck to the core constructs of the language. Anything
 >    that targetted stuff not in the core were mostly being written for
 >    one implementation
 > 
 > 2) Less money involved, and therefore a less determined push for one
 >    feature or another (ignoring egos ;). I can think of a couple of
 >    lisp/cl vendors, but no scheme vendors come to mind. Scheme's been
 >    more of an academic language until now, which could actually give
 >    it great advantages when it comes to moving into the 'real world'

Firstly, Chez scheme is a commercial scheme.  There are others, but I
can't think of their names right now.

In any case, this is exactly why I think there will be some form of
standardization of a larger scheme.  It seems to me that scheme is
about where lisp was before the Common Lisp standard.  There are many
implementations, each providing a more complete language in similar
but incompatible ways.  However, although there doesn't seem to be
much money at stake (no big AI contracts, smaller & fewer commercial
implementations), there are advantages:

1. R5RS as a core standard.  Lisp didn't have a any pre-CL standards,
   and some lisps were *very* different from others, making developing
   the CL standard a difficult task.  Scheme implementations aren't so
   different from each other (on the user side) because they all try
   to be R5RS.
2. The different scheme implementors are interested in a larger
   standard and are working amongst themselves towards developing
   consistent libraries.
3. SLIB exists.
4. CL & ANSI CL as prior art/useful ideas & idioms.
5. Lots of prior art wrt foreign fcn interfaces, network interfaces,
   regexp interfaces, ...

-- 
Harvey J. Stein
BFM Financial Research
hjstein@bfr.co.il