Untyped Scheme should be built on Typed Scheme? WAS: Re: [plt-scheme] macro question

My original response was meant to express "historical development" in  
a concise manner:

1. Scheme was started in 1974 (someone correct me if I am off by a year)

2. Since then, dozens of implementations have revised, extended,  
changed the nature of the language. Thousands of programmers have  
written useful code, including in PLT Scheme.

3. So how in the world could Sam and I think of building Scheme on  
top of Typed Scheme? The idea of Typed Scheme is quite simple:

  * there is useful code out there
  * maintaining with 'types' is easier than without
  * we should provide a smooth path from where we are (Scheme as given)
    to where people may want to be (Scheme with a sound type system)
    without imposing any cost on those who don't wish to come along

This is indeed how research should always work. Researchers discover  
paradise and keep making it more perfect than it always is (Haskell,  
ML). They don't care how ordinary people can get from hell to heaven.  
We (PLT) have decided to build an exemplary bridge on which others  
can follow or which others can mimic and build in different ways.

In general, if you think about how computing evolved this is just a  
small universe that completely mirrors the large evolution. The world  
was untyped. Decades later, people discovered unsound compiler  
pragmas (C), naive type systems (Pascal, Algol) and then went on to  
fancy stuff, including inference (PAL, ML). Two decades later they  
finally realized how fancy types can be interpreted as compiler  
pragmas but to this day, we don't have a completely typed hierarchy.  
Sooner or later you descend from heaven to hell (Led Zeppelin has it  
backwards) and at that point hell breaks loose. You move from simple  
type theorems to full-fledged theorem proving, you yell abracadabra  
and nothing helps. Why would we want to do all this? We haven't even  
gotten the bridge complete or right yet?

End of communication. -- Matthias