Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!titan.rice.edu!dorai
From: dorai@titan.rice.edu (Dorai Sitaram)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Non Chez Nous
Summary: Chezm on you
Message-ID: <1991Mar15.163509.12130@rice.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 91 16:35:09 GMT
References: <4977@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
Lines: 56

In article <4977@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>  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.

I'm posting this rather than just emailing Richard since people seem
to listen when he talks ;-> and it's likely that his discomfort with
Ozan's repository becomes contagious :-<.

>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".

Changing all ['s and ]'s to ('s and )'s using global replace is about
the easiest thing one can do.  Changing them _back_ is not -- for
obvious reasons.  Which is why it helps to retain []'s for those folks
who want to maintain and modify the Ch*z source.

>Then there are things like heavy use of setf, which is not in the
                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^!!!!
>R*RS, nor the standard, nor ...

Nor Ch*z!!  You're probably -- but maybe not, in which case I retract
this paragraph -- referring to my own use of something called setf in
SLaTeX.  Obviously, I _defined_ this macro before using it.  So?

>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.  

Are you saying you find that you have to _rewrite_ the code instead of
defining the few procedures and macros that are not primitive in your
Scheme?  For instance, probably the only non-RRRS Ch*z procedure I
would use is printf, and this is provided by Ken Dickey's format.scm.
Extend-syntax is provided by extend.scm for Schemes ohne
extend-syntax.

>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?

Many instances of useful Scheme code use macros.  RRRS mentions no
macro system, _yet_.  

>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.

I'd of course be glad to see code from you.  I kinda liked "The Craft
of Prolog".

--d