HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Subject: Re: Where I can find IEEE P1178 standard?
Organization: York U. Student Information Systems Project
	<1993Jan21.113805.3467@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 19:32:07 GMT

Chris Haynes writes:

   IEEE (like other standards organizations) explicitely proscribes the
   distribution of standard drafts, electronically or otherwise, after
   publication of the standard.

This is a changing trend, and if IEEE finds other ways to fund its
activities, it would probably follow suit.

example:

|                                           6 November 1992
| 
| 
|    WIDE RANGE OF ITU* DOCUMENTS NOW AVAILABLE ON-LINE:
|   ITU STANDARDS TO BECOME ELECTRONICALLY ACCESSIBLE IN
|                        EARLY 93
| 
| An electronic document distribution service providing remote access to
| ITU documents - TELEDOC - became operational last week.
| 
| Aimed at providing fast and timely access to ITU information to the
| world telecommunication and networking community, TELEDOC is a
| database containing at present:
| 
|    * CCITT and CCIR administrative documents
|    * lists of contributions (substantive input/proposals)
|      to CCITT and CCIR study groups
|    * lists of CCITT reports and Recommendations
|      (i.e. standards)
|    * summaries of CCITT new or revised Recommendations
|    * CCITT and CCIR meeting schedules and other
|      information concerning Study Groups structures
|      and activities.
| 
| As from early next year, the full texts of all new and revised CCITT
| Recommendations (i.e.  all standards approved after the publication of
| the Blue Book in 1988) will also be available from TELEDOC. In line
| with ITU publications policies, it is envisaged to expand TELEDOC
| information base according to identified needs and available
| resources.
| 
|	... etc ...

oz
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: brent@ssd.csd.harris.com (Brent Benson)
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Organization: Harris Computer Systems
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 13:51:02 GMT
	<1jn7ou$m5n@agate.berkeley.edu>

bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes:

> About unspecified values, in my *strong* opinion these should all be
> expunged from the standard and replaced with a nonprinting value, and
> the procedures that now have unspecified return values should all be
> required to return that.

Implementations are free to return a non-printing value for
unspecified return values.  It seems like a bad idea to mandate a
non-printing unspecified return value when there is no clear evidence
that it is the most useful or understandable.  I think it's a good
idea to let implementors try different ideas and see what works best.
Implementators and users will gravitate towards what works.


--
Brent Benson                     
Harris Computer Systems
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Subject: Re: Scheme compiler writing textbook sought
Organization: York U. Student Information Systems Project
	<WAND.93Jan19094053@dec5120z.ccs.northeastern.edu>
	<OZ.93Jan19154553@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> <4602@mitech.com>
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 16:34:03 GMT

George J. Carrette writes:

   Do you have a copy of the Green Book? The name of the book is
   "Design of an Optimizing Compiler"

I think you mean Wulf's neat little book on Bliss compiler work [you
oldtimer you!], and yes I happen to have that too. I thought I would
exclude more general compiler books from the list, [I think compiler
newsgroup would have a good general list] but now that you mentioned
it, I will take a look the green book again...

oz


Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: blume@kastle.Princeton.EDU (Matthias Blume)
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Reply-To: blume@kastle.Princeton.EDU (Matthias Blume)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Princeton University
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 18:55:18 GMT

In article <1jn7ou$m5n@agate.berkeley.edu>, bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU
(Brian Harvey) writes:
|> 
|> About unspecified values, in my *strong* opinion these should all be
|> expunged from the standard and replaced with a nonprinting value, and
|> the procedures that now have unspecified return values should all be
|> required to return that.  It doesn't really matter for experienced Scheme
|> programmers, but it's really confusing to a learner who invokes DISPLAY
|> and sees *two* values printed.

I understand the intension behind ``unspecified'' in R4RS as a way to provide
some freedom to the implementor of Scheme.  A construct that returns an
unspecified value allows to ``leave hands off'' the ``value register'' and
to return whatever is there.  (For an ``if'' without ``else'' I can
imagine an implementation :-) that just returns the value of the conditional
(i.e. #f) whenever the condition is not satisfied.  Likewise for ``set!'' etc.)
A mandatory ``unspecified'' value would force us to use a couple of more
instructions to load this value all over the place.

If you want more strict rules, then I would suggest to specify argument
evaluation order as well.  And maybe strong types would be nice, too.  Why
don't we all switch to ML?

-Matthias
From: gandalf@sabrina.dei.unipd.it (ROBERTO AVANZI)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: low-level macros [was Re: Unspecified values in R4RS]
Date: 25 Jan 93 16:22:59 GMT
Article-I.D.: dei.C1F46B.3sp
Organization: D.E.I. Universita' di Padova, Italia

In article <HANCHE.93Jan24172649@ptolemy.ams.sunysb.edu> hanche@ams.sunysb.edu (Harald Hanche-Olsen) writes:
>>>>>> In article <JAFFER.93Jan24154351@montreux.ai.mit.edu>, jaffer@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Aubrey Jaffer) writes:
>
> > Multiple values are looking like they will be included in R5RS.
> > Unfortunately, the following langage appears in the proposal:
>
>Is a draft of r5rs available?  Any indication which way the low-level
>macro stuff is moving?
>
>- Harald

you should ask a r5rs member to send you some minutes from the last
meeting. I got them from one of the members, but I don't know if I am
allowed to redistribute.
as for the low-level macros, they probably will not be a part of the
standard, while the high level part will
Cheers
Roberto Avanzi
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: jbowen@orca.micro.umn.edu (James C. Bowen)
Subject: Docs for pc-scheme??
Organization: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: Under Grad Workstation Lab.
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 01:52:25 GMT

	If anyone can direct me to documentation for TI's pc-scheme 3.3
(or any earlier version) I would be deeply grateful.  The program is available
at several ftp sites (I got it from altdorf.ai.mit.edu), but nowhere can I
find docs to go with it.  Being a relative newbie in scheme, I can't figure
out how to access many of the features which I can see from the filenames are
part of the package.  
	
	Alternatively, if anyone is familiar with this particular scheme and
would be indulgent enough to answer a few basic questions via e-mail, please
contact me.

				(define name
					Jim Bowen)

Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: sinyaw@starbright.smsc.sony.com (Sin-Yaw Wang)
Subject: Re: Where I can find IEEE P1178 standard?
Organization: Sony Microsystems
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 17:53:06 GMT

In article <C1732H.8BB@dei.unipd.it> gandalf@sabrina.dei.unipd.it (ROBERTO AVANZI) writes:

   I believe you can FTP a draft of the report from nexus.yorku.ca, or from
   some other scheme repository. It is not the final text (it is called p1178d4)
   but it's very close, and I've been told there's almost no difference.
   Hope this helps
   Roberto

I believe that IEEE owns the copyright of the standard.  If any ftp site
still has a copy of the draft, they should remove it right away.
Downloading the draft will violate the copyright.  To get the standard,
send a check to IEEE.

To avoid spending any money, R4RS is free.  You can download it from the
above source.  Note that R4RS is slightly different than the standard,
which is older.

--
Sin-Yaw Wang, sinyaw@smsc.sony.com, 408-944-4076

Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: a2husek@rzdspc5.informatik.uni-hamburg.de (Carsten Husek)
Subject: Problems with Objekts-implementation in pure Scheme
Summary: Programming problems with Objekts and their implementation 
Keywords: Objekts, scheme
Organization: University of Hamburg, FRG
Date: 27 Jan 93 12:45:21 GMT

Hello !

I'm experimenting with Objekts in Scheme usung SICP of Abelson&Sussman
Consider this problem:

I)(define (construct-objekt a b c)
   (lambda (command instance)
     (if (eq? command 'get-value-of) (eval instance))))

II)(define myobj (construct-objekt 1 2 3))

III)(myobj 'get-value-of 'a)

This should return the value 1. But both the interpeter on my PC and the
interpeter at my University (Hamburg) return the error:" Top-Level Symbol A
unbound" !!!!!
Why ?
Here is my interpretation of the programm and why it should work well.
If you use the environment-modell presented in Chapter 3.2.3 in SICP picture
3.7 (German translation of the book, but Chapter & Picture of should be the
same) II) should evaluate to an environment E1 where a,b,c are bound to their
respective values. The myobj-LAMBDA construct should execute in E1.
In E1 ,given command III), (eval inst) should be exactly the same as (eval a),
and executing (eval a) in E1 should return 1 !!!
Can somebody help me? And please explain my misconceptions about environments
and bindings?

-Carsten

"Who thinks that he thinks, thinks only that he thinks"
-rare proverb
From: gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Mini-Scheme ?
Date: 22 Jan 93 11:15:20 GMT
Organization: Mitech Corporation, Concord MA

In article <2415@sousa.tay.dec.com>, secrist@msdsws.enet.dec.com (Strong datatypes for weak minds.) writes:
> Anybody have a cut-down Scheme smaller than SIOD or SCM that would
> fit, without overlaying, into 64K on a microprocessor ?

Good question. Why is SIOD so big? (By the way some archive sites have 
siod 1.x which is smaller).

Well, SIOD.EXE for SIOD version 2.9 on a VMS machine is 33k bytes.
Of course you have to add to that the amount of the C runtime library
you would need. So you don't have much space left for objects. And
you would probably want to store numbers as ints rather than doubles.

Here are some serious suggestions for cutting down the size of SIOD.
With info taken from the LINK/MAP/FULL command under VMS. Good microprocessors
with good compilers should be able to do almost as well in terms of
code compactness as does VAX/VMS, should they not?

CHAR_STRING_CONSTANTS 3562.
                SIOD    21.
                SLIB  2682.
                SLIBA  721.
                TRACE  130.
 
Look at that. Almost four thousand bytes taken up by string constants.
The solutions is obvious. Shorten all error messages to 3 character codes.
Shorten all procedure names to maybe 6 characters or less.

Also, if you don't need arrays you can leave out SLIBA, if you don't want to
be able to trace then leave out TRACE.

 $CODE    27484.
  SLIB    16850.
 SLIBA     8700.
 TRACE     1428.

There is about 28K bytes of executable code. Again, you can leave out SLIBA
and TRACE and get that down to about 17K bytes.

Tell me, am I assuming too much if I state that a good programmer who
knows his microprocessor environment should be able to get that running
on a 64k machine without any problem?

-gjc (who still does pdp-11 work in macro assembler and whitesmith C
      from time to time for big $$$).
From: gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Scheme compiler writing textbook sought
Date: 22 Jan 93 11:18:30 GMT
Organization: Mitech Corporation, Concord MA

In article <OZ.93Jan21113403@ursa.sis.yorku.ca>, oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
> George J. Carrette writes:
> 
>    Do you have a copy of the Green Book? The name of the book is
>    "Design of an Optimizing Compiler"
> 
> I think you mean Wulf's neat little book on Bliss compiler work [you
> oldtimer you!], and yes I happen to have that too. I thought I would
> exclude more general compiler books from the list, [I think compiler
> newsgroup would have a good general list] but now that you mentioned
> it, I will take a look the green book again...

Yes, and Wulf must have been mentioned in GLS's thesis.

Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: hoburg@ramsesii.ultryx.COM (James E Hoburg)
Subject: Testing 1, 2, 3
Organization: The Internet
Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1993 01:09:30 GMT

I appear to have dropped off mailing list.  Please resubscribe hoburg@ultryx.com.

Thanks.

--  James E. Hoburg
    hoburg@ultryx.com
From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Date: 22 Jan 93 16:46:38 GMT
	<BRENT.93Jan22085102@rcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com>
	<1jp5n7$nm@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: York U. Student Information Systems Project

Brian Harvey writes:

   Leaving something unspecified in the standard invites some implementor to
   give it a "useful" value; and that encourages users of that implementation
   to use it; and that makes programs non-portable.

Are there such implementations? Isn't there some that return
#<unspecified>, which is not a "useful" value? Can we point to real
implementations, instead of talking about a hypothetical one?

   It's not as if DEFINE were only invented last week, so we need another year
   or two of experience with it before we can have opinions about what value
   it should return.

So far as I know, even its exact semantics [ie. internal vs top-level]
is under discussion, let alone any values it may or may not return. So
much for things invented a long time ago.

oz
---
Truth doesn't always win friends, but | electric: oz@nexus.yorku.ca
influences people.      -- Batty Koda | pho: [416] 736 2100 x 33976
From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Date: 21 Jan 93 22:23:26 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu

The article raises two questions, one about "unspecified" and one about EQ?.

To the second question, it seems to me that part of the spirit of EQ? is that
it should only take one machine instruction to compute the result.  That's
why EQ? and EQV? are provided as separate mechanisms; EQV? is more "the right
thing" but EQ? is meant to be *fast*!  So if you are proposing some special
mechanism that checks for unspecifiedness and takes extra trouble to return
false, I say that's a bad idea, not because of a wrong answer but because
of the extra trouble.

About unspecified values, in my *strong* opinion these should all be
expunged from the standard and replaced with a nonprinting value, and
the procedures that now have unspecified return values should all be
required to return that.  It doesn't really matter for experienced Scheme
programmers, but it's really confusing to a learner who invokes DISPLAY
and sees *two* values printed.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: dorai@cs.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram)
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 18:43:38 GMT

In article <OZ.93Jan22174029@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>But if you want trivial interactions such as these to work as you would
>like them to, you may just as well do something like what David Kelsden
>sent me the other day:
>
>   (define void (string->symbol ""))
>
>   (define (praise thing)
>     (display thing)
>     (display " is great!")
>     void)
>
>Is this not easier than changing the whole language definition? ;-)

This isn't portable.  Some Schemes (e.g., Chez), as also CL,
preserve read/write invariance -- if you write a symbol,
they let you read it back.  Obviously then, the symbol for
"" can't print as noshow.  (Using some agreed-upon
slashification standard, it prints as || or \<space> or some
such.)

--d
-- 

dorai@cs.rice.edu      !    It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
dorai@owlnet.rice.edu  !      it may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: mjerosc@nmrsun.erenj.com (Miguel Jerosch-Herold)
Subject: gambit compiler??
Followup-To: comp.lang.scheme
Organization: Exxon Research & Engineering, Co.
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:41:55 GMT

Question to MacGambit gurus:

I got a version of MacGambit from sumex but am wondering where 
the compiler is.  The corresponding menu item is not enabled 
and when I use the compile command Gambit complains that 
compile is not loaded.  So where can I find it.  Does it 
allow one to create stand-alone applications?  

Otherwise I think Gambit is great and it beats MacScheme from 
Lightship.  The version I bought does not even have an interface
to the toolbox!

Thank you for any hints!

Michael Jerosch-Herold
mjerosc@nmrsun.erenj.com
From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Date: 24 Jan 1993 09:51:52 -0800
Organization: The Invisible City of Kitezh
NNTP-Posting-Host: columbia.cs.ubc.ca

In article <1jn7ou$m5n@agate.berkeley.edu> bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU
(Brian Harvey) writes:
>About unspecified values, in my *strong* opinion these should all be
>expunged from the standard and replaced with a nonprinting value...
Yes!!! This has a number of pedagogical advantages, not least of which
is that it makes clear the difference between an expression (evaluated
primarily for value) and a command (evaluated only for effect). For
proficient programmers, this isn't a big deal, but for beginners it's
essential. 

I like the Chez Scheme approach. There's a void type, with only a single
value. The procedure (void) yields this value, and (void? x) is a
type-checking predicate. This is a simple, clean, approach, and is quite
compatible with existing Schemes. (If your Scheme doesn't have an
#unspecified, you can always use a gensym.) Apart from this, the only
other change which has to be made is to have the top level print nothing
when the result is void.
-- 
\    Vincent Manis <manis@cs.ubc.ca>      "There is no law that vulgarity and
 \   Computer Science, Langara College     literary excellence cannot coexist."
 /\  100 W. 49th Ave, Vancouver, BC, Canada (604) 324-5205  -- A. Trevor Hodge
/  \ Co-author of ``The Schematics of Computation'', Prentice-Hall, Jan 1994
From: gwilson@majestix.cs.uoregon.edu (Gregory Vance Wilson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Cross-Referencing Tools?
Date: 24 Jan 93 22:08:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.1993Jan24.220821.15726
Organization: University of Oregon Computer and Information Sciences Dept.

I am looking for a cross-referencing tool for Scheme which will tell me
which functions call which, are called by which, reference which top-level
variables, etc.  I am aware that such tools exist for Common Lisp, but am
hoping to avoid modifying one of those myself.

Thanks,

 ========================================================================
  Gregory V. Wilson                          || Work as though you lived
  Dept. of Computing and Information Science || in the early days
  University of Oregon                       || of a better nation.
  gwilson@cs.uoregon.edu                     || - Alasdair Gray
 ========================================================================
From: secrist@msdsws.enet.dec.com (Strong datatypes for weak minds.)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Size of SIOD
Date: 25 Jan 93 18:33:43 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation


	; gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette) wrote:
	;
	;	...
	; There is about 28K bytes of executable code. Again, you can leave 
	; out SLIBA and TRACE and get that down to about 17K bytes.
	;
	; Tell me, am I assuming too much if I state that a good programmer 
	; who knows his microprocessor environment should be able to get 
	; that running on a 64k machine without any problem?

  My apologies, George !  SIOD is beautiful, and I have held it up to others
  as an example of excellence in a world of bloatware.  Thank you very much
  for sharing it with us !

  I guess SIOD came out in the same sentence because I have yet to find a
  C compiler on a PDP-11 (for RSX or RT-11) or for CP/M-80 that will compile 
  it straight-away without having to rewrite things to get around compiler
  issues (with PDP-11 C I guess it's ANSI stuff, and under CP/M with MIX C
  MIX is probably just too lame without going to assembly myself).  Of course
  that has more to do with my lack of time or laziness than anything possibly
  related to SIOD -- so my apologies.

  Would you happen to have an executable binary for RT-11 anyplace (I still
  work and consult on PDP-11s myself).

  Regards,
  rcs
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: jaffer@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Aubrey Jaffer)
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 04:35:56 GMT

In article <1993Jan21.195822.23639@sqwest.wimsey.bc.ca> dak@sqwest.wimsey.bc.ca (David A Keldsen) writes:

   How far can we go in helping programmers to detect dependencies
   on undefined return values?  Should "unspecified" be a contagious
   quality of Scheme objects, as inexact is for Scheme numbers?  
   Are there any papers available on this topic?

In Backus' Lecture in Computer Science describing the language FP he
has a value called top (which looks like an upside down T) which
replaces all error signalling.  It is contagious through all except
conditional expressions, if memory serves.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: rabin@CS.Yale.Edu (Dan Rabin)
Subject: Re: Unspecified values in R4RS
Reply-To: rabin-dan@cs.yale.edu
Organization: Computer Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-2158
	<BRENT.93Jan22085102@rcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com>
	<1jp5n7$nm@agate.berkeley.edu> <OZ.93Jan22114638@ursa.sis.yorku.ca>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 23:56:11 GMT

In article <OZ.93Jan22114638@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca
(Ozan Yigit) asks whether any implementations of Scheme return values
such as #<unspecified> for values that are unspecified by the language
definition.  

To the best of my recollection, T, version 3.1, does so.

  -- Dan Rabin


Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme