Re: [gentoo-dev] *DEVELOPMENT* mail list, right?

["Marijn Schouten (hkBst)" <hkBst@gentoo.org>]

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Hi list,

I'd like to inform you about goings on in Scheme territory.

BEGIN INTERMEZZO
For those who've never heard of Scheme: Scheme is a modern minimal Lisp
programming language.

For those who ask themselves why on Earth people want to put up with Lots of
Irritating and Superfluous Parentheses:
A very enjoyable and insightful and, most importantly, ACCESSIBLE article
giving some insight in the power of program-data equivalence is at [
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html ].
END OF INTERMEZZO

There are about a dozen Scheme implementations in the tree, all with their own
idiosyncratic way of doing things. For example the current Scheme standard
specifies a macro system, but in a lot of implementations you have to enable
it explicitly, and standard extensions (socalled SRFIs) have to be activated
differently for different implementation. All this makes it difficult to write
programs that work in all these implementations.

I want to avoid using just a single implementation, since I feel a
responsibillity to have a basic familiarity with all implementations that I
maintain (and a few that others maintain :) ). I have a few scripts to run
Scheme programs in multiple implementations that also double as my knowledge
base for bending different implementations to my will.

In the last few days I've added a new weapon to my arsenal. That weapon is
slib the portable Scheme library. It has been in the tree for a long time, but
it only used to support guile. Since yesterday slib-3.1.4-r3 supports six
implementations: bigloo drscheme elk gambit guile scm. To my knowledge, which
admittedly is a bit limited, Gentoo is the only distro that has this. At least
I'm pretty sure that Debian doesn't have it :) .

At the moment the script installed by slib to start an implementation with
slib loaded still doesn't work flawlessly in each case, so manually loading
slib is still preferred. I intend to fix it up later and possibly extend
support of slib to other implementations.

I always enjoy hearing from users. If you have a question about how to
activate macros or slib for a specific implementation or any other Scheme
question, please catch me in #gentoo-lisp. I really need to document all this
stuff some time, but things are still very much in motion right now and I
haven't decided how best to insulate users from these issues.

One more thing. Both the Scheme herd and the Common Lisp herd are currently
severely understaffed with one member each (not the same ;) ). If you are
interested in Lisp and want to help, come talk to me,

thoroughly enjoying basking in the power of Scheme, Gentoo and the Sun,

Marijn

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