This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 44 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 44 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Taylor Campbell wrote: > >On Thursday, Oct 30, 2003, at 15:53 US/Eastern, bear wrote: >> You're just trolling here, aren't you? >> >> Things that don't exist aren't useful. EVER. > >Let me rephrase this to mingle the context into the sentence: > >'Types such as dictionaries, sets, et cetera specified by SRFI 44 are >never useful because they don't exist _yet_. They can't possibly be >useful, so they're not even worth considering now!' Call/cc was not useful before it was implemented. It was worth considering, designing and implementing, but it could not yet be used and therefore was not at that time useful. Please note that it didn't get anywhere *CLOSE* to a standardization process before it had a concrete implementation and people could use it. But it was not useful until people could use it. That's what "useful" means. Standards standardize useful things. Plans are for the implementation of _potentially_ useful things. See the difference? If it's not useful, here, now and today, then we don't have a mission to standardize it. It might be worth implenting, in order to _find out_ whether it's useful. If the implementation, including concrete implentations of every collection type specified, and portable means of doing dispatch, and the efficiency functions that make it worthwhile for different collection types to even exist, and all the other things this guy is just handwaving about and saying "not my problem" about, turns out to be useful, *THEN* we should consider standardizing it. Not one moment before. Bear