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From: gavinw@syma.sussex.ac.UK (Gavin Wraith)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: (none)
Message-ID: <17628.9106051018@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
Date: 5 Jun 91 10:18:58 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 39

I have not seen the BYTE review of EdScheme but I can reply to Hallvard
Traetteberg's communication of 3/5/91 [EdScheme - scheme for PC] in which
he asks for responses from people who have tried it. I suspect from what he
says that BYTE's reviewer may have got some details wrong, but as my
computer is an Acorn Archimedes, not an IBM PC, there may be differences
in implementation. I am told that the IBM version provides 24K cell-pairs
for garbage collection. The Acorn version lets you set the memory size for
garbage collection (and for virtually everything else) with  flags on
the command line. Actually, I would be very surprised if the IBM and Atari
versions do not allow that too, because the source code cannot be all that
different. And I can certainly exit from the editor and compile its contents
with a single key-stroke; again I suspect that BYTE's man just got it wrong.

In fact I tend to use EdScheme from the desktop. Scheme scripts can be
written in text windows using the Archimedes's standard !Edit application,
and then they can be compiled and run by dragging the icons of their files
onto the !EdScheme icon. I only use the EdScheme editor for parenthesis
matching. This style of programming is what our students are used to with
Basic, so moving them on to Scheme will not mean any further burden of
learning a new editor.

I am very impressed with the EdScheme package.  We have bought a
site licence for its use in our teaching laboratory at Sussex University.
The fact that the package is available for IBM, Atari and Acorn means that
scripts which stick to the Scheme and turtle-graphics core are portable
between all three makes of micro, which has to be good news.
Our teaching micros have 1Mb RAM at the moment, which is ample for nontrivial
applications.

There is a bug in the Acorn (Atari?) specific procedure 'get-mouse-state'
but I am told that this will be cured when "engines" arrive in the next
version. Although version 3.3 is not fully compatible with the Acorn's
multitasking operating system (i.e it hogs the processor, instead of politely
polling the task manager) it can still be used from the desktop. Earlier
versions had some very mysterious bugs caused by incorrect translation
of the C source from Kernighan & Richie to ANSI standard, but they appear
to have been cured in version 3.3.

-- Gavin Wraith [Undskyld - ikke HalvTraet!]