[racket] Getting started with R6RS

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Sat May 14 22:15:06 EDT 2011

Neil Van Dyke wrote at 05/14/2011 07:16 PM:
> Just to be clear, when I wish for R6RS to be shot in the gut and left 
> to die painfully in a ditch, I mean that in the utmost nice and 
> respectful way. :)  R5RS was getting close to a gem (with a few warts 
> and glaring omissions), and R6RS is this big thing that PLT ultimately 
> did not embrace.  With the effect that people have tended to start 
> trying to do R6RS with PLT tools, but then wonder why there are rough 
> edges and the PLT documentation is mostly full of these other things 
> that don't seem to work in their R6RS program.

To be further clear, I was not speaking there of the innate merits of 
R6RS, but of the situation of the official standard and the most popular 
implementation diverging.

As someone who once went to pains to code portable libraries in a subset 
of R4RS, I eventually decided that Racket was the de facto standard to 
follow for now.  I can always move my personal work back to RnRS or to a 
different dialect, without too much pain, if I want to.  For now, my 
only pain comes from seeing prospective Racketeers get turned off Racket 
and Scheme because they start off assuming they should use R6RS with 
Racket tools and then get confused.  That's why all the displaced 
aggression with the gut-shots.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/


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