On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 09:00:46AM -0800, Bradd W. Szonye wrote: > scgmille@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > There's a giant difference between obsolecence of a proprietary > > function in Scheme systems and obsoleting an agreed upon standard. > > True. When you plan for obsolescence in an agreed-upon standard, > implementors can assume (or at least hope) that any successors will have > a standard upgrade path from the previous standard. If you leave it > unspecified instead, then each implementor must make his own choices and > worry that future standardization will hedge out those choices, with no > clear upgrade path. > > But that's not the worst case. Two influential vendors solve the problem > in very different and incompatible ways. This annoys library > implementors, because they must write two sets of glue code for every > library, to accommodate the differences. It also makes it politically > impossible to ever standardize the unspecified behavior, because there's > no way to do it without alienating a major portion of the users. > So you'd rather we standardize an inferior mechanism now? By your above argument, you can't fix it retroactively through a new SRFI, because it will equally annoy users of both vendors who still have to change to whatever is standardized in a specification, while in the meantime annoying all users by locking them into an inferior dispatch mechanism. At least my way doesn't annoy everyone all of the time. Scott
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