The interesting part is how few trade-offs had to be made to make GC-less (ref-counting) Scheme-to-C compilation attainable, and how closely CRUNCH adheres to R7RS.
Notable is the lack of call/cc, but in my "armchair expert" opinion, it's the ugliest part of the language. Yes, continuations as a first-class object are elegant and succinct, but in order to do anything actually useful with them (like implementing exceptions), you need library code, which makes them much less composable.
I think there's a much more pleasant and practical language lurking somewhere between R6RS "big" and traditional "small" Scheme, but I feel it would take a BDFL to flesh it out.
Notable is the lack of call/cc, but in my "armchair expert" opinion, it's the ugliest part of the language. Yes, continuations as a first-class object are elegant and succinct, but in order to do anything actually useful with them (like implementing exceptions), you need library code, which makes them much less composable.
I think there's a much more pleasant and practical language lurking somewhere between R6RS "big" and traditional "small" Scheme, but I feel it would take a BDFL to flesh it out.
(Meanwhile, back to fixing my init.el.)