On Sun, 2014-05-18 at 04:03 -0400, John Cowan wrote:

> By the same token, there isn't any reason why Scheme programmers
> shouldn't routinely rely on the SRFI 1 list library.  There are two
> highly portable implementations, the sample implementation by Shivers
> and the Chibi implementation, which is optimized for code size.  But a
> weakness in pre-R6RS Schemes is that there is no standard way to include
> the library with your program (other than raw code concatenation),
> and even with the standardization of `import` in R6RS and R7RS-small,
> there is no standard name for this particular library.
>
> Nailing down that in R7RS the library is called (scheme list) or (srfi 1)
> or (srfi :1) is a worthwhile thing to do, because it means that the
> library can be used in applications in a fully portable way.  And that's
> why I want to decide which portable libraries are to be included: not
> to constrain implementers, but to empower users.

This.  As far as I'm concerned, the standard libraries are
nearly useless without a standard way to invoke reliance
on them.  There is no using libraries in portable code if
invoking libraries is not portable to every implementation,
nor if it requires invoking them by different names.

I don't think anybody cares too deeply what name we use;
but we care deeply that there should be a known, portable
name.  It's rather like passing a law that says drive on
the left/right side of the road; either way works, but the
law must be passed anyway because it's something that the
drivers must agree on and it affects the design of the
vehicles' control interface.

				Bear

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