"John.Cowan" <xxxxxx@reutershealth.com> writes:

>> I am very confident that the experts who designed that standard will
>> someday need a new one.
>
> The same applies to the Scheme standard.

Right.  But the nature of IEEE arithmetic is that it has no room for
backward compatible changes.

>> I would like to standardize Scheme's use in such a way that the
>> language doesn't need to fundamentally change anytime such a change
>> happens.
>
> I think that's hopeless.  If there is fundamental change, it will be in
> fundamentally unforeseeable ways.

There are kinds of change (changes in the definitions of particular
freaky cases of functions, or of bitfield lengths, for example) that
we can plan for.