Draft of Red Edition document Vincent Manis (11 Feb 2020 23:28 UTC)
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(missing)
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Re: [scheme-reports-wg2] Draft of Red Edition document
Arthur A. Gleckler
(11 Feb 2020 23:54 UTC)
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Re: [scheme-reports-wg2] Draft of Red Edition document
John Cowan
(12 Feb 2020 00:58 UTC)
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Re: [scheme-reports-wg2] Draft of Red Edition document
Vincent Manis
(12 Feb 2020 01:58 UTC)
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Re: [scheme-reports-wg2] Draft of Red Edition document
Vincent Manis
(12 Feb 2020 02:00 UTC)
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Re: Draft of Red Edition document
Lassi Kortela
(14 Feb 2020 15:44 UTC)
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Re: Draft of Red Edition document
John Cowan
(14 Feb 2020 15:45 UTC)
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I have been working on a formal R7RS-Large Red document, which is intended to be a precise specification of the libraries included in the Red Edition. I have taken the various SRFIs, converted them to LaTeX, and am in the process of trying to make everything consistent. For the reason stated in the first bullet point below, I am not posting the draft just yet, but if we can get the copyright issue resolved, I would hope to have a draft up soon for comment. However, there are a number of unresolved issues that I'd like comment on. Addressing all these issues will take time, but I wanted to get people thinking about them. * UNRESOLVED: the original SRFIs each contain a copyright notice of the form “Copyright © 20xx, YYY. All rights reserved.” This notice technically makes the distribution of this document illegal! Ideally, I believe that R$^7$RS-Large should be placed essentially in the public domain, as was R$^7$RS-Small (which makes the statement “We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part without fee.”) - We need to get written permission of the SRFI authors to use their work in this way. - Future SRFIs intended for incorporation into R7RS-Large should probably bear a different copyright (or permission notice). - I intend to move all the copyright notices from the SRFIs onto a copyright page at the beginning. The existing copyright notice (found in all the SRFIs) seems to be about “Software”, and thus might not be relevant to this Report. IANAL, so there may be other copyright issues I don't know about. * UNRESOLVED: I have only removed the administrivia (SRFI status) and local tables of contents, and have left the Rationales unchanged. In some cases, there is material that belongs here (e.g., the definition of “linear update” from SRFI~1), but much of the Rationale material is about why things are done a certain way. Nothing like that appears in R7RS-Small, so I'm not sure it's a good idea to include it here. Possible courses of action: - delete it all, with the exception of material needed for understanding the specifications, and refer readers to the original SRFI. - delete it all, with the above exception, and extract the remainder to a separate Rationale document (as was done with R$^6$RS). - retain it, perhaps with some editorial compression. I'm pretty neutral on these alternatives, but would note my preferences for clarity and concision. * UNRESOLVED: Some of the SRFIs contain “Procedure Indexes”. I have commented these out (though left them in the LaTeX source); we can decide whether just to leave them out or to reformat/replace them, or perhaps use a mini-TOC or an overview paragraph in each section. * UNRESOLVED: there is wide inconsistency in the notation of individual entries, in particular in type signatures. Some sections use the conventions of the Scheme reports in using specific kinds of names for specific types, while others use a notation reminiscent of ML/Haskell type signatures. Presumably, we should use a consistent notation, but what should that be? Also, authors of future SRFIs should be encouraged to use the same signature notation. * UNRESOLVED: The SRFIs have “Issues” sections, many of which are empty. Any remaining issues should be addressed in the body of the specification, and the Issues sections themselves removed. * UNRESOLVED Should the Implementation sections be removed, or extracted to a separate document? * UNRESOLVED: What about References and Bibliography? Preserve? Remove? Bibliography at end? * UNRESOLVED: Do we want to publish the final report in the “ALGOL 60” format used in R7RS? I'm OK with that, but I'd probably arrange to do that after fixing everything else. (Argument for: consistency with the Scheme reports, argument against: this report doesn't really have much to do with ALGOL 60.) Some type signature notations would really be difficult in a two-column format, so the two decisions aren't independent. -- vincent