This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 9 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 9 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
It is July, 1999. Scheme does not have records. I have given up waiting for a consensus. I thought that the whole point of the SRFIs was to make it possible to move forward without one. That's *a* point of SRFIs. I think it is better to make some effort to get a design that has consensus support. In this respect, SRFIs allow you to *factor* the process of getting a standard together. And they allow people to adopt standards on a finer-grained level, feature by feature. But that is my opinion -- I have dragged out the SRFI-1 process by months in order to hash out consensus, but I think it has been a worthwhile thing to do in order to get a SRFI that (many) people (mostly) like. We digress. You want an extensible syntax. Matthias wants initialized fields. There is no end to what a record definition can be made to do. Look at Common Lisp's DEFSTRUCT. I do not believe that we can come to a consensus right now. Fine. But simply by adding *a pair of parens* -- simple syntax, no extra semantics -- you make it possible for later record proposals to *extend* SRFI-9 in a fashion that allows SRFI-9-compliant code to run unaltered in the newer systems. Note that I am not pushing you to work in any extra semantics, such as methods or initialisation fields. OK, I've had my say; further comment would merely be repetitious. Note that just adding a pair of parens would allow future record forms to have backwards compatibility with SRFI-9. -Olin