Guiding Requirements for the Ongoing Scheme Standardization Process

The Scheme standardization process has produced several Scheme revisions, the most recent one being RRS. The RRS standardization process is underway with an amended charter. The new charter has introduced two language levels, Small Scheme and Large Scheme, succinctly described as “lightweight” and “heavyweight”, respectively. We analyze this new charter and propose some modifications to it that we believe would help the standardization of Scheme, and in particular steer it towards greater use by the software developer community. We suggest that the Steering Committee establish guiding requirements for the two Scheme levels. We discuss some examples of concrete guiding requirements to include in the standardization process for maintenance and debugging. We also discuss the need for an additional general principle for Small Scheme and suggest that, besides the general principle of a small language specification, the notion of efficiency of execution is also at the core of Small Scheme.