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>>>>> "Marc" == Marc Feeley <feeley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: Marc> Frankly, I think this is wrong (i.e. proposing this FFI SRFI before a Marc> "higher-level" FFI SRFI is proposed). If you standardize (through the Marc> SRFI process) low-level functionality before the high-level Marc> functionality is worked out and standardized, you will end up with a Marc> lot of Scheme implementations which will not support it, and a bunch of Marc> users that use this FFI to write their code thinking that it is portable. I don't follow this argument. (Actually, I can't follow a single step of it.) Why does any low-level FFI automatically imply "a lot of Scheme implementations which will not support it," and how is this fact changed by having a high-level interface first? I'd say the low-level stuff is exactly the place to start, because it can be used to explain the semantics of any high-level mechanism. Moreover, there are lots of ways of interfacing C code where a high-level interface would only be in the way---specifically, when generating the glue code from header files, SWIG-like descriptions, or some other set of pre-existing bindings. Marc> In my experience, a high-level FFI that only supports basic types Marc> common to C and Scheme (numbers of various precisions, Booleans, Marc> characters, nonnull-strings and possibly-null-strings, and Marc> null-terminated arrays of strings) is sufficient for most Marc> applications. In my experience, it isn't. -- Cheers =8-} Mike Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla