This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 55 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 55 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
There seems to be a tendency in this mailing list that I find somewhat distasteful: SRFI-55 is a tiny little thing, a small device to make it straightforward to access things provided by libraries, or other forms of externally available extensions, in this specific case SRFIs. Several Scheme implementations (the majority of the serious ones, aynway) already provide such a device, so this SRFI is just trying to standardize common practice. Now, it seems that some people take this as an opportunity to make big statements about million line programs and the dangers to the future of Scheme. This is ridiculuous. Moreover, there appears now to exist a common consent among these people that I'm just an ignorant, clueless little jerk who doesn't know what he's talking about. But I can live with that. So to you guys which have already zeroed in on me, mindlessly repeating the mantras "you don't understand it!", "you are fracturing the Scheme world!" and "you just want to force your own taste on us!". I heard it. I heard it now several times. It's ok. I registered it. You should have come to the conclusion by now that I can't be intimidated by this style of meta-argument, especially since each and every of these statements is wrong. Pragmatism and ease of use is important to me, and common practice is important to me as well, because it tells me that Scheme implementors and actual Scheme programmers, who actually produce code, seem to prefer the REQUIREish form (an indication of which is that most Schemes already have some sort of REQUIRE, with minor syntactic differences). The wonderful thing about the SRFI process is that it allows variety, where different designs can compete by "letting the market decide" (so to speak), i.e. one can look how well a SRFI gets accepted or not accepted. I don't think finalized SRFIs are standards as such, I think David Rush called it "feeder process" for real standardization (like R6RS, which is currently forming). So if you don't like it, just ignore it. Remember: There is no "danger" in REQUIRE-EXTENSION. cheers, felix