Ron Teitelbaum wrote:
> To be sure it is possible that my reactions to the arguments are the result
> of naivety.  I am not aware of much of the past history and I have not
> reviewed the relative parser implementations.  I will back off and let
> Andreas and Lukas discuss the details.  

Please don't. We have too little user perspective in this discussion. As 
a maintainer, I will be perfectly happy to change things if there are 
FFI users requesting changes (and if they are within my abilities to 
change). So rather than listening to Stefane's insults I'd like to get 
more feedback from FFI users, in particular with respect to the 
following questions:

If you are an FFI user and like the proposed changes:
a) Where do you see the advantage of it for your work? How would you 
describe the value added? How would you argue to convince someone else 
that their code should be changed to the new model?
b) Since there is room for ambiguity in supporting the current FFI spec 
and the proposed changes, do you think both styles should be supported 
for an intermediate period?
    b1) If yes, for how long?
    b2) If no, how do you propose to deal with migration?
c) Given the choice, would you rather have an "inplace" change or 
perhaps an alternative version of the foreign function interface, aptly 
called FFII (pronounce as FF-2)?

Cheers,
   - Andreas