Am Do., 10. Sept. 2020 um 22:18 Uhr schrieb John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org>:

> In addition to Harold's response: It may simply be too hard to reconcile all concerns, particularly in a large, complex, messy, and empirical (in the sense "a-theoretical") SRFI.  SRFI 170 is extreme on all four of these factors, and has taken us almost 500 days to get this far.  Debate is not free.

What I have been worrying about is that R7RS (large) may fail its
goal. R6RS was criticized so the idea of R7RS (small) + R7RS (large)
was born. But we can only succeed if the new language will be a better
one allowing fewer points of criticism. Especially because there was a
lot of brain drain after the switch to R7RS (in particular the Racket
and the Chez people).

We don't have to be as perfectionist as the author of TAOCP. But our
combined work will be somewhat monumental and it would be a pity if it
wouldn't survive.

HTML has become (at least outside the W3C) a "living standard". If we
can get such a model working for R7RS (large), it can be a huge step
forward because whatever design mistakes we make now, we have a chance
to correct later. Maybe, this can be solved with library versioning.
Unfortunately, R7RS (small) decided to use (scheme XXX) and the
reddish editions of R7RS (large) have continued to use (scheme XXX) so
all future standards have to use something more complicated (unless we
define that (scheme XXX) is the "current" version of whatever library
while the initial R7RS will only be guaranteed when accessed through,
say (scheme XXX (7)).)

Marc