R7RS (by alaric)

There has been recent discussion on r6rs-discuss about the r7rs draft charters, most of it arguing from various camps.

I want a Scheme that lets me apply advanced programming language techniques - lightweight Higher-order functions and Hygienic macros rather than Boilerplate code, Continuations rather than a fixed set of predefined Control flow mechanisms, symbols rather than Enumerated types, Functional programming rather than getting tangled with too much state, dynamically-scoped parameters rather than God objects - to my day-to-day tasks. I'm a professional programmer; for a living, I've written code in Java, C, C++, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, AWK, shell and JavaScript, and I'd love to have been able to use Scheme for all of the above. I'm limited more by the usual commercial pressure than by any technical issues with Scheme or the qualities of my favourite implementation, Chicken, so my wishes for R7RS are relatively minor in terms of changing the semantics of the language. What I really want is a Scheme report that will unit the Scheme community, so we can continue to have a wide array of innovative implementations that all have their own strengths and weaknesses - but with much better portability of libraries between them, so they really do start to feel like one language with multiple implementations rather than separate languages.

So I feel that things like module systems and access to networking needs to be standardised, so each implementation doesn't gratuitously have their own syntax for doing the same thing. But these things need to be optional, so implementations are not constrained to be large in order to earn the name "R7RS Scheme".

So I thought I'd step up and propose a solution.

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