Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!ZURICH.AI.MIT.EDU!jar From: jar@ZURICH.AI.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Rees) Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme.c Subject: Does scheme run on the DECStation 3100? Message-ID: <9002111446.AA06598@zurich.ai.mit.edu> Date: 11 Feb 90 14:46:26 GMT References: <9002111247.AA17108@chaos> Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background) Distribution: inet Organization: The Internet Lines: 48 Date: Sun, 11 Feb 90 07:47:53 -0500 From: "Jim Miller" ... Yale's T (not "true" Scheme, but a variant with a mode very much like Scheme), Sorry to go into defensive mode here -- I fully agree about T's unreliability -- but what does it take to qualify as "true" Scheme? The only deficiencies I know of are minor, like numbers not quite being Revised^3 Scheme numbers. Call-with-current-continuation and tail recursion are both supported. the compiled semantics do not match the interpreted semantics, As far as I know, this is only in the case of situations that are considered errors, and for some peripheral situations involving T's extensions to Scheme. A minimal CommonLisp implementation already has a useful program development environment ... This is not an a priori feature of the languages, but a historical artifact of the way Common Lisp implementations have so far always been built. (f) There are multiple public-domain versions of Scheme, but to my knowledge only one complete public-domain version of CommonLisp (Kyoto CommonLisp or KCL). The price of a non-public Scheme system is far lower than the corresponding price for CommonLisp. What about Spice Lisp from CMU? I thought that was freely available and legally unencumbered. (I think you misunderstand the term "public domain," which really means that no one is trying to control the way in which the software is copied in any way. None of the software you mention is public domain in that sense.) (g) Converting code from CommonLisp to Scheme is generally very difficult because of the size differences between the languages. Converting from Scheme to CommonLisp is generally easy as long as one avoids the more exotic uses of call-with-current-continuation and macros. If I may plug my own product: There's little need to convert manually from Scheme to Common Lisp, because there exists an automatic translator that does most of the job. - Jonathan