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From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Non Chez Nous
Message-ID: <4977@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 15 Mar 91 06:47:51 GMT
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 25

I'm teaching a course on symbolic programming this year, so I'm always
on the lookout for Scheme examples that I can use.  There seems to be
something about Chez Scheme that makes people using it more likely to
share their code than others.  But there also seems to be something
about Chez Scheme that makes people provide code that others can't use.
As a comparatively minor example, apparently Chez Scheme lets people
use square brackets [...] as well as round parentheses (...) for lists.
Fine.  But it's not in the R*RS and it wasn't in the draft standard I
saw, and none of the Schemes I have access to supports that "feature".
Then there are things like heavy use of setf, which is not in the
R*RS, nor the standard, nor ...

I really don't want to sound ungrateful, oh, let's be honest, I *AM*
ungrateful.  When someone says "I have some Scheme code you can use"
and I then burn up net cycles FTPing it and then have to spend more
of my time converting the stuff *to Scheme* than if it had been in
Common Lisp or Pop in the first place, I am *NOT* grateful.  Is it
really the case that R*RS Scheme is such a pathetically crippled
language that people _have_ to use Chez extensions all over the place?

Any interesting examples I come up with this year I am going to send on
to Ozan Yigit, but you can be sure I'll have tried them under three
different Schemes first.
-- 
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