Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!UICBERT.EECS.UIC.EDU!wilson From: wilson@UICBERT.EECS.UIC.EDU (Paul Wilson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme Subject: R4RS changes? Code? Message-ID: <8812072227.AA00515@uicbert.eecs.uic.edu> Date: 7 Dec 88 22:27:22 GMT Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 32 Several people (myself included) have posted requests for large Scheme programs, with disappointing results. Apparently relatively few people use Scheme for really serious development, and very few write portable (e.g., R3RS) Scheme code. I was wondering if this is likely to change over the next couple of years, perhaps as a result of a more completely standardized language. When is the R4RS likely to come out, and what is it likely to standardize? Will a macro facility be standardized? Dynamic or fluid variables? These seem to me to be the most important Lisp features not specified by the R3RS. Is there a consensus growing as to how either of these should be done, or is it too early to settle on a standard? Whatever the answer is, what does it imply for the future of Scheme? Will it be a "toy" language forever, like unextended Pascal? Or will it eventually be a medium-sized language with a lot of available libraries, like C? (And will it be a family of incompatible languages, like Pascal, or take over the world, like C? :-). Right now, I need to guess whether there will be sufficient programs available within two years to gather performance data for some implementation techniques. If not, I may have to go with another language for some of the things I need to do, and that could be painful. -- Paul Paul R. Wilson Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory U. of Illin. at C. EECS Dept. (M/C 154) wilson%uicbert@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu Box 4348 Chicago,IL 60680