[R6RS] Re: Less verbose type definition form

[Michael Sperber]

"Manuel Serrano" <Manuel.Serrano at sophia.inria.fr> writes:

> I would have some comments on this proposal. In particular, I don't
> feel comfortable with the initialization stuff (first extension) but
> before discussing this in detail, I will wait other comments to see
> where we are going with now two concurrent proposals...

What is frustrating to me in this discussion is that we're back to
to the state of things before the meeting:

We agreed that we'd focus on satisfying requirements rather than try
to incorporate everyone's neat ideas.  We formulated requirements for
the records facility at the meeting, and charged somebody with
producing a proposal that would do that, based on what Kent presented
at the meeting itself.

"Verbosity" (or "succinctness") wasn't on the list of what we wrote up
for the records---as far as I can remember, nobody even suggested that
it be put on there.  We may agree to add it, but I object to making
the goals fit the proposals rather than vice versa.  Just alternating
counterproposals based on criteria we haven't agreed on (yet?) is not
going to get us agreement on the proposals themselves.  For this
particular issue, we'll never agree on "the best syntax," because
everyone else has a different idea of what that should be, and the
design space is huge.

(This is how we got the Unicode SRFI out the door---there's still
plenty of disagreement on the syntax, but none affects the
requirements in a strong way.)

What would be much more helpful would be actual responses to the
issues raised with the current proposal, as they arise from the goals
and requirements.  I apparently didn't do a good job of explaining the
goals, and how the draft meets this, but Kent did on a number of
occasions:

http://mailman.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/private/r6rs/2005-June/000695.html
http://mailman.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/private/r6rs/2005-June/000694.html
http://mailman.iro.umontreal.ca/mailman/private/r6rs/2005-July/000761.html

(We'll try to do a better job of explaining these things in a revision
of the draft.)

In particular, Kent addressed "verbosity" in the last of these posts,
and specifically why we didn't choose an approach more like Marc's
proposal.  (Also, Marc's proposal is less verbose in some cases, but
more verbose in others.)

As far as I can see, the only one who even followed up on these posts
was Anton.  Moreover, nobody seems to have based criticism of the
draft based on the requirements and goals, which makes it difficult to
drum up a rationale for making changes.

I believe Kent and I tried, conversely, to cover the issues raised by
everyone else.  If there's anything we overlooked, please let us know.

-- 
Cheers =8-} Mike
Friede, V?lkerverst?ndigung und ?berhaupt blabla