[plt-scheme] Re: PLT R6RS questions and answers

Tom Gordon <thomas.gordon at fokus.fraunhofer.de> writes:

> I don't know what people you are talking about, who you claim are
> doing less than the PLT team to support R6RS.  For my part, and my
> colleagues, we took the effort to port our entire system to from PLT
> Scheme to R6RS.   This involved porting, or helping to port, a number
> of SRFIs, the SSAX and SXML libraries, the PSTK (Tcl/TK graphics
> library) and some other stuff to R6RS and make this code available to
> others <http://carneades.berlios.de>.

Except you haven't ported PSTK to R6RS - that's
fundamentally impossible since R6RS supports neither
inter-process communication nor an FFI.

Instead you have several files, one for each implementation.
That's one way people achieve portability in R5RS.  For any
large, practical application, it's no easier to achieve
portability in R6RS than in R5RS, and the latter gives you a
wider range of implementations to choose from (including
PLT).

You may argue that R6RS is a step in the direction of easier
portability, but so far all it seems to have done is faction
the community further.

-- 
Alex