This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 103 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 103 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
The thing that I rather dislike about this srfi (and here I'm speaking of the draft right now on schemers.org) is the way in which it seems to simultaneously be agnostic about operating system, and yet, at the same time, incorporates at a deep level assumptions about what file names are. Notice that r5rs and r6rs filenames are simply strings. Even that, on some historic operating systems, is perhaps too much, but it's a reasonable compromise. But draft srfi 103 actually imposes the assumption that these strings refer to hierarchically organized filesystems of the vaguely Unixoid type. This sort of file system organization was innovatively wonderful in the seventies, when there were competing systems with a simple two- or three-layer system. So what srfi 103 assumes is that file names are hierarchically organized, that these pathname components are separated by a *single* os-dependent character, and so forth. This is *way* too much. It's already too much to be mandating hierarchically organized files, but this can't deal with the syntax of TOPS or VMS. I'm not a great fan of those systems, but surely we don't need to be further restrict the possibilities. We have here, as far as I can tell, more design-in-the-absence-of-use, and this time, language design trying to mandate operating system design principles.