========

        I teach courses in computer science at a small liberal-arts
college.  We use Scheme in our introductory course because its
simplicity and expressiveness enable our students to understand some
of the key ideas of computer science -- notably recursion, procedural
abstraction, and data abstraction -- quickly and accurately, without
the encumbrances of fragile syntax and quirky semantics.  We also use
Scheme in more advanced courses (such as our courses on programming
languages, algorithms, automata theory, and computational
linguistics), particularly for small, specialized examples and
demonstrations.  My interest in the R6RS standard is to keep the core
language small, simple, expressive, and accessible to novice
programmers, while accommodating, through the development of
libraries, the vast increase in the effective range and usability of
Scheme during the fifteen years since the publication of R5RS.

        I am also working on a small textbook on algorithms in which
the code examples are presented in a purely functional subset of
Scheme.  This work gives me an additional interest in R6RS:  I'd like
to be able to use standard library mechanisms to control the subset
explicitly.

========

It's finals week here, which is a very busy time, so I was doing one
or two other things at the same time.  The total elapsed time between
my reading Alan Bawden's announcement and my submitting the finished
statement may have been more like forty-five minutes.