[ANNOUNCE] SRFI --- A new approach to portable Scheme code

[sperber@Informatik.Uni-Tuebingen.De (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor])]

This announces the inception of the SRFI process.

Everything you need to know about it is at:

	http://srfi.schemers.org/

A SRFI is "Scheme Requests for Implementation," and the process is a
new approach to helping Scheme users to write portable and yet useful
code.

In the past, writing portable Scheme has been difficult.  The Scheme
standards simply do not specify enough functionality to write serious
software.  This is unfortunate, as almost every Scheme implementation
does provide considerable library functionality.  However, in the
past, there has been little coordination between language implementors
to synchronize the interfaces to their libraries, even when different
implementations provided the exact same functionality.

The SRFI process is a forum for people interested in coordinating
libraries and other additions to the Scheme language between
implementations.

It provides mailing lists and a web site to specify, discuss, and
archive additions to Scheme, in the hope that the maintainers of the
major implementations will draw from this work when they add
functionality to their implementations.  Eventually, this will
hopefully allow useful Scheme programs to be portable among
implementations if they provide the necessary functionality.

We expect, among others, SRFIs for list handling, records, exception
handling, foreign function interfaces, and object systems in the
near future.

.. The SRFI Editors
	Shriram Krishnamurthi
	Dave Mason
	Michael Sperber