Slashdot Mirror
Draft Scheme Standard R6RS Released
Watson Ladd writes, "The new version of the official Scheme standard has been released as a draft (PDF)." From the draft: "[This] report gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme."
Isn't it amazing how much effort people will go through to specify something that NO ONE will use in any sort of production capacity?
All right, to be fair, I'm sure there is SOMEONE out there that has used Scheme in a production capacity, but that's only because he was an idiot who wanted to use his little plaything language rather than use something everyone else will be able to be maintain.
There is a reason that C and C++ derived languages dominate the industry.
You are a sick, sick person. There are a lot of languages which are far easier these days and actually have relevance. Why in the world would you point someone at Scheme as a first language - given that it is a language they may have at most 3 or 4 opporunities to use later in life?
How that language ever acquired a reputation for being a "clean, simple" design, I will never know. The Scheme number system alone is a mess, and reducing the number of primitives by creating a can of worms like CALL-CC is not good design. Furthermore, at 142 pages long, the language is getting rather bloated.
We need a nice, clean, simple, powerful teaching language to replace C and Java; Scheme is not it.
"properly tail recursive" is an oxymoron. Tail recursion is not proper. Decent programmers use loop constructs for looping.
Your problem is that Scheme can't do that. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sure, you can emulate a loop construct, but this is pure stupidity. Needless recursion makes your code more convoluted and less readable.
Just like Pascal, Scheme is a lobotomized teaching language. Just like Pascal, you will find people who try to use it for real work while the rest of us groan in horror. Actually, Pascal whips Scheme's sorry ass.
In my language of choice, I can do looping with recursion. I can also do looping with goto. I know enough to avoid pulling dumb-ass stunts like that.
It's amazing how people can claim a deficiency as some kind of advantage. You just keep smoking...