On 8 Oct 2025, at 22:52, Peter McGoron <xxxxxx@mcgoron.com> wrote:

>> It is true that the process document contains no mention of it. But the Golden Rule must apply: the SRFI editor should take action to avoid a result that would be detrimental to generally-understood principles of reasonable public policy, even where no explicit written rule covering the specific case exists.
>
> The "generally-understood principles of reasonable public policy" should not mean contradicting black-letter policy ("the editors may not reject a proposal because [...] they think it is a wrong-headed approach to the problem").

Doch.

The entire point of the Golden Rule is that if strict application of the written law would lead to an absurdity, the written law must give way to allow a more reasonable ruling.

Moreover, this is a matter of details, not of approach. While I think Wang should withdraw his SRFI because of the confusion the different structure of the SRFI namespace it prescribes would cause, I am not appealing to Arthur to require total withdrawal, nor even to require that the proposed alternative structure of (srfi …) library names be changed. I am appealing only to Wang to do the right thing on that count.

I am appealing to Arthur specifically and only on the matter of SRFI names assigned by authors which are now being removed in a SRFI whose intention is otherwise clearly to extend essentially the same database of names. (And, to prevent another potential objection: Given that this removal is being justified by explicit reference to SRFI 97’s original policies, and all the names established by SRFI 97 are unchanged, another example of an absurdity would be to claim that these names are *not* meant to somehow carry on the naming scheme established by that SRFI and extended by subsequent assignments in the SRFI metadata. If Wang wants to start a new database of names, he should state that explicitly in his SRFI and ideally justify why – but I don’t think that’s what he wanted to do.)

Daphne