[bjoli]

r6rs was hugely controversial for many reasons. r7rs-small went back to the r5rs roots, whereas many of us (yes, me included) thought building on r6rs would be the better choice.

Much of the process that was started in r6rs led to racket. Kent Dybvig was the head of the standards body and the racket folks were also active in the mailing lists. I think a big part of the disagreement was about correctness. r6rs guarantees some things about a running program that is difficult to do for many small hobby projects. There was also a discussion started about things like immutable data (pairs and strings, mostly) which got people all hot and bothered.

The problem with r7rs-large is that it will have to solve many of the problems solved by r6rs (low level macro system, how to handle unicode etc...) which means redoing the r6rs work.