[racket] Running Racket in the R6RS mode

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 12:03:54PM +0900, Alex Shinn wrote:
> 
> Hello Rouben!  You probably don't remember me, it's
> been years since I took your diff eqs class :)

Hello Alex.  I certainly remember you by the name but I cannot
honestly say that I remember your face from the nearly two
decades ago.  Anyway, I am very happy to see your involvement
in the Scheme Working Groups.  Those committees do a great
service to the community, despite the flak that they get from
it at times.

My interest in Scheme is as a hobbyist rather than that of a
serious user.  I see myself as an onlooker who views Scheme
from the outside.  From my perspective, Scheme is a very neat
language whose knowledge can be quite rewarding.  Learning it
has certainly expanded my horizons and has influenced the
way I think and program in C which is my primary programming
language.

My wish is that there will come one day when the Scheme
community will rally around a stable, useful, compact, and
standardized language, and that all major implementations will
make it their goals to implement that standard.  I want to
emphasize the "compact".  A language that throws in everything,
including the kitchen sink, in order to appease the critics
won't serve that purpose.  If I want Common Lisp, I know where
to find it.

A language standard that is widely implemented and supported
matters a lot to me.  I don't want to lock myself it into
a specific implementation.  If I spend my time and energy
into coding an algorithm, I want some assurance that if the
implementation X ceases to exist, my code still will run
on implementation Y.

Right now I have Bigloo, Guile, Larceny, and Racket on
my laptop.  I also have several smallish projects that I
have written in Scheme over the years.  Not a /single/ one
is portable.  Each one is locked into the implementation for
which it was written.  In a few cases I have ported a project
from one implementation to another while cursing the state of
affairs that has necessitated such a waste of effort.

Anyway, I am wishing the best for you and your committees
and hope that R7RS will bring us closer to a widely supported
and implemented Scheme standard.

Rouben