There is a strong sense that some kind of exception system is needed. However, no specific proposal was ready at the time of the meeting. A committee has been formed to work on one. What seems to be in the air might be described as a highly distilled version of the condition system that Kent Pitman developed for Common Lisp. I hope that I'll be able to report on this in a future column.
On the subject of libraries, Will Clinger's minutes report that ``the authors perceive a need to give some library official status. In fact, we need to give official sanction to multiple libraries. There is reason to distinguish between accepted (or standard) libraries, experimental libraries, and proposals. The accepted libraries can reduce the intellectual size of the language by removing things like string->list from the report. The experimental libraries would contain solid implementations of experimental features, including things that might never deserve to be in the report. The proposal libraries could contain anything implemented in portable Scheme.''
Among the content of the accepted libraries, some features (such as those that may be moved out of the body of the report) may be required to be built in to implementations, while others will be expected to be available on demand (perhaps using something similar to, but not the same as, require as found in Common Lisp and GNU Emacs).
A librarian was appointed (Rees), and a library committee is developing proposals for the charter, structure, and content of the libraries.
I would like to acknowledge Will Clinger, who prepared the minutes of the meeting, and the various people who contributed proposals, including Bill Rozas and John Ramsdell. Any errors here are my responsibility, however. Thanks also to Norman Adams and Richard Kelsey for corrections to a draft of this article.
I would also like to belatedly acknowledge Norman Adams, Pavel Curtis, Bruce Donald, and Richard Kelsey for their comments on drafts of my previous column.
For future columns, I am entertaining various topic possibilities, including eval, threads, amb, and monads. If you have other ideas, and particularly if you think the written record on the language is particularly poor in certain areas, please write and let me know.