The spec covers not just the language itself, but the whole standard library.
> The R5RS Scheme specification is 50 pages.
And with those 50 pages, you can not do anything useful out of the box. Yeah, you can solve SICP excercises, but thats essentially it. All useful features are implementation specific, and the Scheme ecosystem is more fragmented than the Balkan. Scheme code is essentially non-portable amongst the 1001 existing implementation. You dont write "Scheme" directly. You write code either for "Guile" or for "Chicken" or "Bigloo". PLT doesnt even call their implementation Scheme any more, they call it Racket. You dont write Scheme, you write Racket.
This leads to the question of why a standard was nescessary at all, if youre not standardizing a critical amount of features to enable portable code.
The spec covers not just the language itself, but the whole standard library.
> The R5RS Scheme specification is 50 pages.
And with those 50 pages, you can not do anything useful out of the box. Yeah, you can solve SICP excercises, but thats essentially it. All useful features are implementation specific, and the Scheme ecosystem is more fragmented than the Balkan. Scheme code is essentially non-portable amongst the 1001 existing implementation. You dont write "Scheme" directly. You write code either for "Guile" or for "Chicken" or "Bigloo". PLT doesnt even call their implementation Scheme any more, they call it Racket. You dont write Scheme, you write Racket.
This leads to the question of why a standard was nescessary at all, if youre not standardizing a critical amount of features to enable portable code.