On Thu, May 9, 2019 at 8:59 AM Marc Feeley <xxxxxx@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

>> Lassi, you might want to look at what is available currently in Scheme implementations before reinventing the wheel.  Many Schemes have OS interfaces.  A set of design objectives might be good too before you commit to implementation, and your general principles are a good start.

I need to explain why I chose to use scsh as the base document for this SRFI.  There were several reasons:

Scsh, especially the 0.7.6 version, is fairly old. Essentially everything in it, including what's marked non-Posix, actually is Posix at this point.  (Of course not everything works on Windows; that's unavoidable).  Indeed, Scsh has no current constituency: using it favors no one active today.  The documentation at scsh.net that I used reflects a 13-year-old version based on an obsolete version of Scheme 48, which is not a very popular Scheme these days either.   There's a more recent version at <https://github.com/scheme/scsh> which is only five years old, and works with the "current" (also five-year-old) version of Scheme 48.

On the other hand, Scsh has been influential, particularly on Guile and Chicken.

I will add these things to the Rationale.
 
BTW, it is sad that networking is out of scope… again… It is such an essential feature in modern apps, at least basic networking.  I think things get complex (politically) when the details of the socket interface are exposed, but there should be agreement on basic and portable features.

Is filesystem path syntax in scope?  i.e. /foo/bar vs C:\foo\bar

Both of these are out of scope for this SRFI, but very much in scope for R7RS-large as a whole.  I have a pre-SRFI for paths at  <https://bitbucket.org/cowan/r7rs-wg1-infra/src/default/PathnamesPython.md>, and another one at DatagramsCowan.md for UDP packets specifically.  If people think SRFI 106 is inadequate, I'm happy to see a competing SRFI (but not too many, please).


John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.  --Oscar Wilde