HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: schwartz@roke.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
Subject: Re: Compilation on SPARC
Distribution: comp
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 21:43:07 GMT

rpg@cs.tulane.edu (Robert Goldman) writes:

   why hasn't anyone else?

My (quite possibly incorrect) observation is that, for most people's
purposes, an interpreter adequate.  Most people who use scheme seem to
be either

 1) doing research on programming languages.  unless they are researching
    optimization techniques there is no point in writing a compiler at all,
    and if they are, only one platform is necessary.

 2) teaching intro cs classes

 3) using scheme as an embedded command language.

Only a very small number of scheme developers seem interested in using
scheme do to actual systems and application programming.  (If I'm
wrong about that, post lots of messages here!)  I wonder if an
advantage of Dylan will be that its user community will have different
goals than the scheme community.
From: gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: symbols: upcase = downcase. WHY?
Date: 16 Oct 92 10:25:38 GMT
Distribution: comp.lang.scheme
Organization: Mitech Corporation, Concord MA

In article <1992Oct13.113643.4508@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE>, kobler@informatik.tu-muenchen.de (Daniel Kobler) writes:
> I'd like to ask the following question:
> 
>   What is the reason for
>   not distinguishing between upper and lower case letters in
>   symbols?

Most lisp implementations I've dealt with have had a way
for the user to control the case cannonicalization done by READ.

So you could set a switch to preserve case if you wanted, or
to canonicalize case if you wanted to do that. Sometimes the
canonical case would be UPPERCASE, and sometimes lowercase.

Sometimes the default would be to canonicalize, sometimes to
preserve, case information.

The real question might be why some scheme implementations and
scheme standards ignore this fairly common feature.

-gjc
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: u8123033@cc.nctu.edu.tw ()
Subject: CallWithEnvironment
Keywords: CallWithEnvironment, Scheme, OOP
Organization: National Chiao Tung University
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 04:20:19 GMT

Hello everyone,
    I'm studying how OOP is implemented in C-Flavour.
I tried to write my own implementation of C-Flavour but
I'm trapped at the part of CallWithEnvironment.
    Can anyone please teach me how CallWithEnvironment is
written? I think it's the core of C-Flavour; it's it that
enables everything to work.
    Thanks in advance! Please reply in this group, or write
to is81033@weber.cis.nctu.edu.tw.

          Paladin Mu
From: bobp@hal.com (Bob Pendleton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Looking for a scheme
Date: 13 Oct 92 16:45:43 GMT
Organization: HaL Computer Systems, Inc.


 In article <JAFFER.92Oct9105743@camelot.ai.mit.edu>, jaffer@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Aubrey Jaffer) writes:
> From the copyright notice: (C-SCHEME)
>  * This software may be distributed (but not offered for sale or transferred
>  * for compensation) to third parties, provided such third parties agree to
>  * abide by the terms and conditions of this notice.  
> 
> Do these terms allow use in a commercial product?  Would the seller
> have to separate scheme-to-C from his proprietary code?  Would one
> have to put a shrink wrap licensce on the scheme-to-C part?

You can always just ask DEC to license it to you. Or you can aks them
what the restriction really mean. 

				Bob P.

-- 
Bob Pendleton             | As an engineer I hate to hear:
bobp@hal.com              |   1) You've earned an "I told you so."
Speaking only for myself. |   2) Our customers don't do that.
                   <<< Odin, after the well of Mimir. >>>
From: rwk@silver.sbi.com (Richard W. Kreutzer Consultant)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Compilation on SPARC
Date: 12 Oct 92 18:40:46 GMT
Distribution: comp
Organization: Integra Software Corporation
In-reply-to: schwartz@roke.cs.psu.edu's message of 10 Oct 92 21:43:07 GMT

In article <BvxAwM.DKw@cs.psu.edu> schwartz@roke.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:
Path: pivot-sts!sbi!internet!psinntp!psinntp!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!psuvax1!schwartz
   From: schwartz@roke.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz)
   Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
   Date: 10 Oct 92 21:43:07 GMT
   References: <RPG.92Oct9125349@clones.cs.tulane.edu>
   Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet)
   Distribution: comp
   Lines: 21
   Nntp-Posting-Host: roke.cs.psu.edu

   rpg@cs.tulane.edu (Robert Goldman) writes:

      why hasn't anyone else?

   My (quite possibly incorrect) observation is that, for most people's
   purposes, an interpreter adequate.  Most people who use scheme seem to
   be either

    1) doing research on programming languages.  unless they are researching
       optimization techniques there is no point in writing a compiler at all,
       and if they are, only one platform is necessary.

    2) teaching intro cs classes

    3) using scheme as an embedded command language.

   Only a very small number of scheme developers seem interested in using
   scheme do to actual systems and application programming.  (If I'm
   wrong about that, post lots of messages here!)  I wonder if an
   advantage of Dylan will be that its user community will have different
   goals than the scheme community.






Maybe its a Catch 22.  Maybe more programmers would use Scheme to develop
applications if there were procudtion quality compilers more readilly
available.  As for 3) above, even if one uses Scheme as an embedded command
language, one might want to "compile" the "extensions".  Or perhaps more
often, even when Scheme is used as an embedded command language, that fact
does not preclude major portions of the application (perhaps all of the
application) from being written in Scheme.

As for Dylan, what user community are you referring to?  I would rephrase that:

   I wonder if an advantage of Dylan will be that its *developers* (namely Apple)
   will have different goals than the scheme *developer* community.

Dick
--

--
        Richard W. (Dick) Kreutzer
Net:    rwk@quark.sbi.com				CIS:	70702,2174
Voice:  +1(801)571-2446					FAX:	+1(801)571-2448
Mail:   Integra Software Corp.; 1378 Jasmine Avenue; Sandy, UT 84092 (USA)
From: kend@data.rain.com (Ken Dickey)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re^2: Compilation on SPARC
Date: 12 Oct 92 16:16:39 GMT
Article-I.D.: data.718
Distribution: comp
Organization: Microtek DSD, Hillsboro, OR

schwartz@roke.cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes:

>Only a very small number of scheme developers seem interested in using
>scheme do to actual systems and application programming.

This is probably true.  There are some of us (myself included) which
are very interested in using Scheme in industry, but the educational
problem (of both management and SW engineers) is large.  This is
changing as more people with Scheme experience are entering the work
force.  In the mean time, it is difficult to motivate much commercial
compiler and runtime work without an industrial user community and
conversely.  

It is much easier to do research in reasonable languages than to do
industrial software in reasonable languages.  So there is a tendency
for most people who want to work in reasonable environments to be
doing research.

In the mean time, there is quite a bit of Scheme going on within large
companies, frequently unknown to higher management (who are in general
unaware of the issues in any case).  The situation is much improved
from when I started using Scheme in industry 10 years ago.  The
wheels turn slowly, sigh.


-Ken Dickey
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: davidf@golem.uucp (David J. Fiander)
Subject: Whither eval?
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 23:18:03 GMT

Well, as I said in my last article, I'm slowly working my way
through Abelson and Susssman^2.  The scheme that they describe
(by now, it's a sort of Ur-Scheme, I guess), has the form

	(eval <form> <environment>)

as well as procedures which will allow for the creation of
environments, and a special symbol, which is bound to the
current environment.  I am more familiar with LISP, which has

	(eval <form>)

which evalates <form> in the existing environment.

I have noticed, however, that neither form is provided by scm
(4a12), and nor is eval mandated by R4RS.  I'm sure that there
are very good reasons why one might want to exclude eval from
the language, but is there another way to achieve the same
effect?

- David
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: gumby@Cygnus.COM (David V. Henkel-Wallace)
Subject: DEC (was: SIOD now runs on ALPHA)
	<TED.92Oct6110540@lole.nmsu.edu>
Organization: Cygnus Support, Palo Alto, California
Date: 7 Oct 92 05:18:33

   Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 18:05:40 GMT
   From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning)

				   i expect that everybody who ever used
   an pdp-8, or 11, or a decsystem 10, or 20 will have good reason to
   mourn before too long.

I mourned when DEC left the computer business in the mid '80s.
Somehow they thought that focussing on puny 32-bit IO processors was
the way to go!
From: pk@cs.tut.fi (Kellom{ki Pertti)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Algorithms & Datastructures in Scheme
Date: 14 Oct 92 10:13:16
Organization: Tampere Univ. of Technology, Finland.
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: talitiainen.cs.tut.fi
In-reply-to: kjdriese@vnet3.vub.ac.be's message of Fri, 9 Oct 1992 15:32:05 GMT

In article <9210091532.AA29526@vnet3.vub.ac.be> kjdriese@vnet3.vub.ac.be writes:
   As far as I can see in the list of schools using Scheme, we (Brussels Free
   University) are the only ones using Scheme for a course in Algorithms &
   Datastructures.

You are not alone! We in Tampere University of Technology have been
using Scheme in our data structures and algorithms course for a while.
I'll send the material I have to you via email, but I thought I'd
let the world know that there are people using Scheme in data
structures courses.

The reason why our data structures course was not listed is that I
only remember seeing a query about the use of Scheme in introductory
programming (where we also use it). Maybe there are still others
using Scheme who have not been listed for the same reason. It is also
sometimes difficult to guess the contents of a course from its name --
our data structures and algorithms used to be called "Advanced course
in programming".
--
Pertti Kellom\"aki (TeX format)  #       These opinions are mine, 
  Tampere Univ. of TeXnology     #              ALL MINE !
      Software Systems Lab       #  (but go ahead and use them, if you like)
From: bevan@cs.man.ac.uk (Stephen J Bevan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Compilation on SPARC
Date: 12 Oct 92 20:00:40 GMT
	<RPG.92Oct9125349@clones.cs.tulane.edu> <BvxAwM.DKw@cs.psu.edu>
	<1bc8ulINN8ru@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester
In-reply-to: ci123@cleveland.Freenet.Edu's message of 12 Oct 92 16:25:57 GMT

In article <1bc8ulINN8ru@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> ci123@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (T. Kurt Bond) writes:
   >* I think the current Scheme definition has too many procedures in it.
   >  You can therefore guess that I'm less than happy with systems such
   >  as T and MIT Scheme which seem to be closer to Common Lisp that
   >  Scheme to me (the perceived of size/power ratio of Scheme was one of
   >  the reasons I gave up Common Lisp to use Scheme)

   But MIT Scheme (and T, from what I can tell) seem to have larger goals than
   just implementing the language; they seem to aim to provide a programming
   environment, and I think that's where a lot of the size comes from.

My comments above aren't meant to be a critisism of MIT Scheme and T
per se, rather the comment is meant to explain why the systems do not
suit me (though I'm sure they more than adequately fill the role they
were designed for).  I'd like is a stripped down version of either,
but I guess I'll just have to keep dreaming :-)


   [Digression: Will GAMBIT Scheme run on your machine?  It's *much* smaller
   than MIT Scheme; certainly I had no space problems when I was running it 
   (version 1.7 and 1.8) on a 4 Megabyte Mac SE/30.  If only it ran on more 
   than just 68xxx based machines.]

I've tried GAMBIT on a Sun 3 and was impressed with it, however the
main requirement I have for any compiler is that it works on SPARC
based machines, so GAMBIT is not an option :-<

bevan
From: allynp@theoffice.Eng.Sun.COM (Allyn Polk)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Source Code Measurement??
Date: 15 Oct 1992 22:27:21 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems
Distribution: world
Reply-To: allynp@theoffice.Eng.Sun.COM
NNTP-Posting-Host: theoffice

Is anyone aware of a utility for scheme that will deliver a report of the 
areas of source code exercised by a test?  Basically, I am looking for
something like tcov for scheme.


thanks,


allyn
From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: old DEC machines (what has this got to do with scheme?)
Date: 8 Oct 1992 03:28:51 GMT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu

gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette) writes:
>In comp.lang.scheme you are in particular going to see some old timers.
>
>"The only machine you will ever have to -know- (invest effort) in
>is the PDP-10"

Well, as one of the old-timers, I want to say in our defense that falling
in love with an architecture made much more sense back in our day, when
we actually programmed in assembler, than it does now.

These days I couldn't care less what processor is on my desk -- but sometimes
I wish whatever it is ran TECO!  :-)
From: robertl@cwi.nl (Robert van Liere)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: MIT Scheme <--> C
Date: 11 Oct 92 15:21:35 GMT
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam



Hello, this is undoubtably a FAQ, but :

Is there a document describing how MIT Scheme interfaces with other
languages, in particular C ?

I would like to interface a) to SGI's 3D-graphics library and b) to a simple
user interface toolkit called FORMS. The graphics library consists of C
functions, some of which return C longs/floats and/or arrays. The interface
to the toolkit is more sophisticated; it contains some opaque type definitions
and callbacks.

Any suggestions ? Has someone implemented one of these interfaces 
already ? (He ask hopefully.... any SGIers out there ?)

-- Robert van Liere




-- 
Robert van Liere, Department of Interactive Systems,
Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI)
Kruislaan 413,  1098 SJ  Amsterdam,  The Netherlands
email: robertl@cwi.nl | tel: +31-20-592-4118 | fax: +31-20-592-4199
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: dascalos@valhalla.cs.wright.edu (Chuck Dascalos)
Subject: Scheme equivalent to LISP's eval
Organization: Wright State University
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 16:42:41 GMT

I am trying to figure out what the scheme equivalent of LISP's eval is.
I can't seem to find it in any of the documentation I have.  Does such
an animal exist??

Thanks for you help
Chuck Dascalos
Wright State University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: shivers@csd.csd.hku.hk ("Olin G. Shivers")
Subject: Symbol case
    From: Daniel Kobler <kobler@informatik.tu-muenchen.de>
    Subject: symbols: upcase = downcase. WHY?
X-Unparsable-Date: Thu, 15 Oct 92 21: 34:45 HKT
Organization: The Internet
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 22:50:19 GMT

      WHY should 'WALL be the same as 'Wall? What is the reason for
      not distinguishing between upper and lower case letters in
      symbols?

    I think the answer should not contain
	  `... due to historical reasons ...' or something like this.

No kidding. I agree. I would like Scheme to change to case-sensitivity
on READ's symbol interning. I can't think of a good reason for READ to
fool with the case of symbols. Is there a non-historical reason for
this?

Flushing case information removes a useful distinction. It is convenient to
associate related things in a program by conventions on the case of related
variables.  For example, a ship record type might be bound to Ship, and
an individual record might be bound to ship.

Throwing away case information has messed up my life recently because I have
designed a Unix shell around Scheme. Now, in this shell, the run macro
executes a Unix program. For example, here is how you untar a file, saving
errors in file errlog:

	(run ("tar" "xf" "scm.tar")
             (> 2 "errlog"))

Inside the run macro you give what is called a "process form."
A process form is not Scheme; it's a separate notation. Now,
it's a pleasant rule for this notation that symbols stand for
the equivalent string -- lowercased, because this is Scheme, and
we don't have case information for symbols. So I can just say

	(run (tar xf scm.tar)
             (> 2 errlog))

However, if I say

	(run (more Readme))

I get a surprise, since the shell, ignoring case information, ends
up running the more program with argument "readme", not "Readme".
To read the file I wanted, I needed to say
	
	(run (more "Readme"))

This is clumsy and irritating.

You also get hosed by symbols that begin with "-" -- R4RS won't accept strings
like -lCF as symbols. So we end up having to quote arguments:

	(run (ls "-lCF" /usr/tmp))

This is also clumsy and irritating. As far as I can see, this restriction
exists to allow the number -i.  I personally think restricting the set of
readable symbols so that people can write complex numbers in this particular
syntax is not a worthwhile tradeoff. I would prefer another # prefix for
complex numbers, as in #c4+5 or something.

But to return to the main point, I *really* can't see the point behind
having READ single-case symbols. I would like this changed.
	-Olin
From: snelting@ips.cs.tu-bs.de (G. Snelting)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Scheme typechecker
Keywords: typechecker
Date: 8 Oct 92 15:15:23 GMT
Organization: Inst. f. Informatik, TU Braunschweig, FRG

Does anybody have a (polymorphic) typechecker for
(a functional subset of) SCHEME?

Please answer per email to snelting@ips.cs.tu-bs.de

Thanks, Gregor Snelting
From: rme@msi.com (Richard M. Emberson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Looking for a scheme
Keywords: PD scheme
Date: 8 Oct 92 15:37:45 GMT
Organization: Molecular Simulations, Inc.


  I'm looking for a version of scheme that:

    1) Can serve as an application extension language,
    2) Is public domain (can be used a commercial product),
    3) Has an "class/object" layer (can define classes and their instances, etc.),
    4) Allows one to call C and C++ code,
    5) The object layer allows one to wrap an existing C++ class heirarchy,
    6) Allows one to execute scheme scripts from C/C++ code,
    7) The scheme can be compiled,
    8) The scheme is reasonably portable (SPARC, Intel, Alpha, etc.).
    9) The scheme implementation is reasonable compliant with R4RALS.


  Please either post your wisdom or mail it to:


   Richard Emberson
   rme@msi.com
-- 
Molecular Simulations, Inc.             mail: rme@msi.com
796 N. Pastoria Avenue                  uucp: uunet!msi!rme
Sunnyvale, California 94086             phone: 408/522-9233
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: jaffer@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Aubrey Jaffer)
Subject: Wanted: Scheme macrologist for SLIB
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 04:19:55 GMT

Many of the recent submissions to SLIB have been macro packages.  As I
don't use macros and have other demands on my time, perhaps someone
else would like to maintain the macro packages in SLIB.

Some things I would like to see happen in SLIB are:
  Modify sc-macros so that they can produce syntactic forms in
addition to LAMBDA, IF, QUOTE, and SET!.  Some interpreters and
compilers can optimize LETs, DOs, and other syntactic forms but not
code composed only of primitive expression types.
  Port syntax-case to SLIB.
  Better testing of the macro files.

Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: thinman@netcom.com (Technically Sweet)
Subject: Re: MIT Scheme <--> C
Organization: International Foundation for Internal Freedom
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 00:39:40 GMT

jinx@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Guillermo J. Rozas) writes:

>What you sent applies to Scheme->C, not to MIT Scheme, which is what
>the original poster asked about.

Mr. Tessman of SGI also failed to mention that SGI is abandoning the 
GL window management calls.  Building an interface to them is, in some sense,
shoeing a dying horse.  SGI boxes are switching over to X for 2D and
window management.

-- 

Lance Norskog

Data is not information is not knowledge is not wisdom.
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
From: jaffer@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Aubrey Jaffer)
Subject: scm4a12 Scheme release available
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 21:23:03 GMT

This message announces the availability of Scheme release scm4a12.

SCM4a12 now GCs and frees all of its malloced storage before exiting.
A function RESTART is also provided which GCs and frees all storage
and then restarts SCM.  This behavior should allow porting to
MSWindows.

ISATTY? has been added.  The printing of the prompt is now controlled
by (VERBOSE) and initially off if stdin or stdout is not ISATTY?.

A problem with user defined interrupt handlers has been fixed.
Interrupt handlers now seem to be working well enough to run the
lightweight multiprocessing code in slib1b11/process.scm.

From hugh@ear.MIT.EDU (Hugh Secker-Walker): Syntax forms are now
memoized so that syntax checks are done only once.  Full syntax
checking is now done.  Interpreter is now smaller and faster and uses
less stack space.  Modifications to code are now made under DEFER_INTS
as they always should have been.

Scm conforms to Revised^4 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme
and the IEEE P1178 specification.  Scm is written in C and runs under
Amiga, Atari-ST, MacOS, MS-DOS, NOS/VE, VMS, Unix and similar systems.
ASCII and EBCDIC are supported.

Documentation is included explaining the many Scheme Language
extensions in scm, the internal representation and how to extend or
include scm in other programs.

SCM can be obtained via FTP (detailed instructions follow) from:
altdorf.ai.mit.edu:archive/scm/scm4a12.tar.Z
nexus.yorku.ca:pub/scheme/new/scm4a12.tar.Z

SLIB is a portable scheme library which SCM uses:
altdorf.ai.mit.edu:archive/scm/slib1b11.tar.Z
nexus.yorku.ca:pub/scheme/new/slib1b11.tar.Z

  ftp altdorf.ai.mit.edu [18.43.0.246] (anonymous)
  bin
  cd archive/scm
  get scm4a12.tar.Z
  get slib1b11.tar.Z
or
  ftp nexus.yorku.ca (anonymous)
  bin
  cd pub/scheme/new
  get scm4a12.tar.Z
  get slib1b11.tar.Z

`scm4a12.tar.Z' is a compressed tar file of the C code distribution.
`slib1b11.tar.Z' is a compressed tar file of a Scheme Library.

Remember to use binary mode when transferring the *.tar.Z files.
Be sure to get and read the GNU General Public License (COPYING).
It is included in scm4a12.tar.Z.

To receive an IBM PC floppy disk with the source files and MSDOS
and i386 MSDOS executables send $60 to
   Aubrey Jaffer, 84 Pleasant St. Wakefield MA 01880, USA.
Net 30 day purchase orders are minimum $100.

If you like scm you can support the developement and maintainence of
it by buying a disk from me or by sending money to the above address.
Money received will also help speed the release of a free symbolic
mathematics system (written in scheme).