>> I believe that a non-interoperable approach to keywords will inevitably >> lead to the xkcd "standards" situation: <https://xkcd.com/927/> > > Seriously, what kind of interoperability is strived for on a technical level? Though it is a joke, it's also a serious observation. The ten Scheme implementations listed in the 177 rationale with their own native keyword systems are not going to drop those systems if R7RS-large (or 177) specifies an incompatible system. Instead, they will add the new system as an alternative to their existing one. That proliferation will add more code and documentation to the implementation, and users' Scheme code will have to choose which keyword system to use at the cost of compatibility with the other one. The precise amount interoperability achieved on a technical level is everything in the Specification section of SRFI 177. Everything that can be written using those tools (lambda/kw, define/kw, call/kw) is fully interoperable with the native keyword systems of all Schemes listed in the rationale.
