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kawa goals [was: rnrs hashtables]
On 10/13/2010 11:49 PM, Helmut Eller wrote:
* Per Bothner [2010-10-13 22:45] writes:
The goal is to be able to support a strictly-conforming R6RS mode,
where portable R6RS programs work correctly, and non-R6RS programs
don't work accidentally. In strict-R6RS-mode, if you want to use a
Kawa extension, you have to request it (import it) explicitly,
using a specific 'kawa' import. Of Kawa is very far from supporting
anything like that, and it's not a super-high priority, but at
least we should not deliberately do anything that contradicts that goal.
May I ask what the high-priority goals are?
Good question - not that I have a good answer. Except get 1.11
out the door, and finish some blog articles I've started on.
Win fame and fortune? Explore my ideas in programming language
design and implementation? Have fun? (I'm playing with some ideas
for a line-oriented non-Lisp syntax, though this is not intended to
replace Kawa-Scheme, but be a compatible sibling alternative language,
sort-of like Qexo/XQuery is.)
Actually, I was thinking about asking people for requests.
I.e. if there was one or two improvements to Kawa you could vote
for, what would they be? For example we could work on: support for
annotations; easier gui programming; improved R6RS compatibility; call/cc;
persistence; database access; easier web programming; better
type inference; sequence/iteration APIs; Scala-like "views"; data
binding; string template syntax; etc etc.
(Just to mention some ideas from the top of my head.)
Some of these I'll work on as I feel inspired, but it might be
useful to get feedback on what people would like - with no
promises that I'll take any specific action.
Of course these are specific issues. "Goal" is perhaps more
a matter of philosophy. One goal is to try to explore the
contrast between dynamic "scripting" languages and static
compiled "programming" languages, and try to find a good
balance between them.
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/