Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: PC Scheme/Geneva release 4 available !
From: max@Kolmogorov.gac.edu (Max Hailperin)
Date: 5 Nov 92 10:34:28
Reply-To: Max Hailperin <max@nic.gac.edu>
 <MARKF.92Oct30124010@montreux.ai.mit.edu><1992Nov4.110057.1@uni2a.unige.ch> <Bx8HAw.Drv@news.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN
In-reply-to: sas52992@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu's message of Thu, 5 Nov 1992 08:08:54 GMTLines: 52

In article <Bx8HAw.Drv@news.cso.uiuc.edu> sas52992@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu
 (Sanjay Ashok Sheth) writes:

   ... One possibility may be an interface similar to one present in
   Schematik for the NeXT operating system. ... If you want more
   ideas, take a look at Schematik or even some other integrated
   debugger like the ones out for C, Pascal, etc. by Borland.

Pleased as I am to see Schematik (which I co-authored) cited as an
exemplar, it occurs to me that many people may not have NeXTs on which
to try out Schematik.  Those who do, may not know where to get
Schematik. Therefore, I'm writing primarily to suggest another
exemplar that runs on more common hardware and secondarily to provide
the availability info for Schematik.

My basic point is that before resorting to C, Pascal, etc. systems, it
might pay to look at some other Scheme (and Lisp generally) systems
out there that use similar "graphical" user interfaces.  (Mouse
oriented editing, plus some other mousable stuff like windows, menus,
and push-button panels.)

EdScheme for the Macintosh comes to mind right of the bat (though
there have been other such systems, dating back at least to the lisp
machines).  It was asked about by another poster recently.  It has the
virtue of running on popular hardware.  Unlike Schematik it costs
money, but not a lot and it goes to a good company (Schemers Inc.).

I've got a beta-test copy of version 4.0, so I'm not 100% how much of
the user interface is the same in the currently released version, but
the version I've got contains some nice features the designers of
other GUI's would be well advised to imitate.  The main difference
from Schematik is that it maintains a chronological transcript window,
while Schematik has a free-form "interaction" window.  (Note that
Schematik is in the company of emacs and edwin here, while EdScheme is
like several other commercial systems.)  Experienced users like to be
able to treat the interaction window just like other editing windows,
but many of my beginning Schematik users have begged for the imposed
discipline EdScheme provides, since they muddle their interaction
windows up and thereby get hopelessly confused about the causal
relationships of what they've got.

In the nice and unusual features category, EdScheme has an "auto
indexing" feature, whereby you can swiftly get a menu of the names
defined in a particular editing window, select from that menu, and be
taken to the corresponding definition.

Now for those lucky enough to have a NeXT: you can anonymously ftp
Schematik from ftp.gac.edu in the pub/next/scheme directory (start
with the README file).  Europeans can get it more locally from
ftp.informatik.uni-muenchen.de, in the directory /pub/next/ProgLang;
start with Schematik-1.1.5.1.README .  Schematik is also apparently
included on NeXT's "Educational Software Sampler" CD-ROM.