On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 09:00:46AM -0800, Bradd W. Szonye wrote:
> xxxxxx@freenetproject.org wrote:
> > There's a giant difference between obsolecence of a proprietary
> > function in Scheme systems and obsoleting an agreed upon standard.
>
> True. When you plan for obsolescence in an agreed-upon standard,
> implementors can assume (or at least hope) that any successors will have
> a standard upgrade path from the previous standard. If you leave it
> unspecified instead, then each implementor must make his own choices and
> worry that future standardization will hedge out those choices, with no
> clear upgrade path.
>
> But that's not the worst case. Two influential vendors solve the problem
> in very different and incompatible ways. This annoys library
> implementors, because they must write two sets of glue code for every
> library, to accommodate the differences. It also makes it politically
> impossible to ever standardize the unspecified behavior, because there's
> no way to do it without alienating a major portion of the users.
>

So you'd rather we standardize an inferior mechanism now?  By your above
argument, you can't fix it retroactively through a new SRFI, because it
will equally annoy users of both vendors who still have to change to
whatever is standardized in a specification, while in the meantime
annoying all users by locking them into an inferior dispatch mechanism.
At least my way doesn't annoy everyone all of the time.

	Scott