The Scheme of Things:

The June 1992 Meeting

[1]To appear in Lisp Pointers V(4), October--December 1992.

An informally constituted group of people interested in the future of the Scheme programming language met at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center on 25 June 1992. The main purpose of the meeting was to work on the technical content of the next revision of the Scheme report.

We made progress on several fronts:

• Some differences with the IEEE Scheme standard were resolved.

• Proposals for multiple return values and dynamic-wind were adopted.

• A proposal for an eval procedure was adopted.

• The high-level macro facility described in the Revised Report's appendix will be moved into the report proper.

Two subcommittees were formed: one to work on exceptions, and one to charter the formation of a standard library. The subcommittees will report back to the group with proposals for inclusion in the report.

It had been hoped that there would be progress on some other fronts (user-defined types, dynamic binding, improvements to ``rest'' parameters), but after inconclusive discussion these topics were dropped. These topics will probably be taken up again in the future.

Norman Adams was appointed the Revised Report's editor. It is hoped that it will be ready by early 1993, so as to precede the reconstitution of the IEEE standard group.

This article is my own interpretation of what transpired, and should not be construed as definitive.

• Agreement with the IEEE Scheme standard
• Multiple return values
• Unwind/wind protection
• Evaluating computed expressions
• Macros
• Committee work
• Appendix: An implementation of dynamic-wind
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