[R6RS] Are we stuck?

[Marc Feeley]

I think we are stuck.

There has been little discussion about modules lately yet I haven't
seen consensus on Matthew's proposal.  Why are we stuck?  I'm not sure
what the reason is for other editors, but for myself it is that I
don't feel I have enough experience with the proposed system to really
make significant contributions to the discussion, so I mostly wait to
see what others think.

I would like to propose a change of approach.  We should work on
building a portable implementation of the module system so that we can
all experiment with it in our own Scheme implementation.  This would
get us more involved in the details of the module system, allow
proposed changes to be made and evaluated on-the-fly by changing the
portable implementation, and the resulting public-domain code would
greatly increase acceptance of R6RS by other implementors.

It certainly represents quite a bit of work (most of the front-end of
a Scheme compiler), but still reasonable if we use existing code such
as Kent's portable syntax-case implementation, MzScheme's
implementations of the module system, and Gambit's reader, for
example.

Your thoughts please.

Marc