Re: [Scheme-reports] Comments on R7RS, draft 7

On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Steve Hafner <steve.b.hafner@x> wrote:

Here are a few minor comments on R7RS, draft 7:

Page 8 it says "None of the identifiers defined in this report contain
upper-case characters, even when they appear to do so as a result of
the English-language convention of capitalizing the first word of a
sentence." The second clause "even when they ...." seems an odd thing
to tax the reader with. Pages 27 and 47 are the only places I see
where identifiers actually begin a sentence, and in these cases none
of the identifiers are capitalized. Nor should they be capitalized, as
Scheme grammar should take precedence over English grammar. Perhaps
better would be to rephrase the sentences so that identifiers never
begin a sentence.

Thanks. I've done the rephrasing you suggest over time, but some mistakes must have crept in. I'll fix those soon. I've left the sentence on page 8 in place partly in case I missed one of those mistakes.

IEEE 754-2008 is mentioned a number of times, but no reference is given.

You're right. We reference IEEE Standard 754-1985 (item #19 in the bibliograph), but should update that to IEEE Standard 754-2008.

Page 80, "Additional Material": Why not give http://www.r7rs.org/ as
the sole reference, which can list other sites as they come and go.
Also, I would guess that www.r7rs.org will be the place for errata,
which seems an important thing to draw the readers attention to.
Additionally, all the examples on page 81 could be removed from the
report and placed on www.r7rs.org. Other examples could be added to
the site by the Scheme community.

Even if references can come and go, it's good for a standards document to represent a moment in time so as to establish context, among other things. I do agree that there should also be a web site, and that setting up http://www.r7rs.org/ is a good idea. However, there are already volunteers maintaining http://schemers.org/, and doing a good job of it, so we've chosen to include that site.