Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!ukma!ufcsv!codas!mtune!bakerst!cgh!manta!brant
From: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general
Subject: MIT Scheme on UNIXpc (Was: Re: More memory or more swap space?)
Message-ID: <334@manta.UUCP>
Date: 14 Jan 88 15:50:26 GMT
References: <329@manta.UUCP> <688@umbc3.UMD.EDU> <3285@ems.Ems.MN.ORG>
Reply-To: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes)
Organization: Soul of the Gnu Machine, Philadelphia
Lines: 24

In article <3285@ems.Ems.MN.ORG> mark@ems.Ems.MN.ORG (Mark H. Colburn) writes:
>	I have tried to bring up Scheme version 3.5 (?) on my 3b1 at home.
>Unfortunatley, the d*mn thing will not compile due to the way that it is
>written.  It will always fail with a 'too many defines' error message.

Early on in my 3B1 career I tried this too.  I discovered that the C
preprocessor (/lib/cpp) that comes with the utilities doesn't do
dynamic symbol table management.  The fix was easy enough: I snarfed
the Gnu C-Compatible C Preprocessor from mit-prep, compiled it
(straightforward) and used it instead on /lib/cpp.  CCCP does proper
symbol table management; Scheme compiled effortlessly after that.

Unfortunately, Scheme is no less of a memory hog than KCL, if not
worse.  It's got a large "microcode" and also uses a two-space GC.  It
ends up being impossible to get anything worthwhile running on it
without lots of rehacking.  They also had an untested disk-based GC
that was supposed to free up more memory, but I didn't play with it.
My general impression was that if you don't have at least a 4M virtual
space, you can forget MIT Scheme.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Computer and Information Science
ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant