Why should I be interested in this - given there are many free high quality implementations for Scheme like Racket, Gambit etc?
Chez is known for being very fast, and for using state-of-the-art compiler technology.
Chez Scheme is now free
61–70 of 185 posts
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought scheme was like the beatles - people universally only had good things to say about it.
I might not be getting a reference here, but FWIW, I had a recent experience with Scheme that was interesting. I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia). My thoughts were: 1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct…
Schemes minimalism and elegance makes it a great first language (in my opinion). Plus you can explore multiple programming paradigms - functional, imperative, object oriented. There are legitimate reasons why scheme isnt a very practical language, but its a good first language imo.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought scheme was like the beatles - people universally only had good things to say about it.
I might not be getting a reference here, but FWIW, I had a recent experience with Scheme that was interesting. I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia). My thoughts were: 1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct…
#1 - srfi 9 solves this mostly, though I agree about the long names. If your implementation doesn't bundle that for you, you should probably use a different implementation.
#2 - preach it.
#3 - The "big" schemes provide hash tables for you.
#4 - Well... fexprs used to be standard in lisp, but implementers didn't enjoy figuring out what a symbol meant at compile time.
I dunno, I really enjoy coding in scheme. Especially syntax-rules. I know syntax-case is the bees knees, but syntax-rules is pretty easy for me to model quickly.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I might not be getting a reference here, but FWIW, I had a recent experience with Scheme that was interesting. I did SICP nearly 19 years ago as a freshman, in 1997. And then a few months ago, I ported the metacircular-evaluator -- the "crown" of the course -- to femtolisp (the Lisp implementation underlying Julia). My thoughts were: 1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct…
>1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct), (caddr) Every Scheme implementation I know of supports record types aka SRFI-9[0]. No one actually makes new data types from cons cells. >2) Scheme code is very imperative! Scheme supports many programming paradigms. Imperative programming is one. Functional programming, object-oriented programming, and relational programming are…
OK, point taken about #1. It is valuable to have the basic axioms and then separate syntactic sugar.
But #2 and #3 are what I would call bootstrapping problems... in other words, there is a reason that C is the foundation of computing rather than Lisp. I don't think anybody really thinks otherwise anymore. But for example, set-cdr! is not in the lambda calculus, and you need it even for basic things.
Likewise, Scheme implementations have mutable hash tables, but they're written in C and not Scheme. I don't know how you even write a hash table based on cons cells rather than O(1) indexing.
Regarding #4, here is a good link. The basic idea is that macros could just be functions on lists, and then you get composition of macros like you have composition of functions. Paul Graham incorporated this into Arc.
http://matt.might.net/articles/metacircular-evaluation-and-f...
My point is you could say Scheme sits at a somewhat awkward place between "not foundational enough" (not fully bootstrapped) and "awkward in practice" (compared to say Python). Though I wouldn't go as far as to say that... Obviously it was groundbreaking work that influenced Python and R and tons of stuff we use today. It's outstanding research, but it feels like it has been almost fully incorporated into the computing culture now.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#65Cisco prices from 2013 SP-SW-LMIX0CH0 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wind, Per Unit $65.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Linux, Per 10 $325.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CHW SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wwind, Per 10 $325.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CH1 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Apple Mac,Per 10 $325.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CHA SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00 SP-SW-LMX01CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00
Chez Scheme price schedule I received in 2002:
Chez Scheme Version 6
Software License Fee Schedule
V60901f
Supported machine types:
Intel 80x86 Linux 2.x
Intel 80x86 Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000
Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.x
Sun Sparc Solaris 2.x
Classification License fee (USD)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Single Machines
first machine per machine type $4000
each additional machine 3000
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Site
first machine type 9000
two machine types 14000
three or more machine types 19000
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Academic Site (for qualified academic institutions)
first machine type 4500
two machine types 7000
three or more machine types 9500
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Corporate
each machine type 24500Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#66IIRC, this was a high performance scheme developed at Indiana University that was closed source for a long time. Good on Cisco for open sourcing it. I'm interested to hear what regular scheme programmers feel about this news.
It's massively strange that this was closed source while at a public university, and open source under a public company.
It wasn't quite developed at Indiana University. It's based on research that was done at Indiana University, but the actual development was done by a spinoff company, Cadence Research Systems. Vaguely similar arrangement to how the original Google was "developed at Stanford" in the loose sense of being based on research the founders did while at Stanford, but it was owned by a spinoff company.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#67IIRC, this was a high performance scheme developed at Indiana University that was closed source for a long time. Good on Cisco for open sourcing it. I'm interested to hear what regular scheme programmers feel about this news.
It's massively strange that this was closed source while at a public university, and open source under a public company.
It actually predates Dybvig's time at Indiana; he started writing it as part of his PhD work at UNC Chapel Hill. Plus, he set up Cadence Research Systems for licensing Chez Scheme, so it was never owned by any university.
The part where Cisco open sourced it is a bit unusual, but it's not uncommon for people to close source and sell systems they create during college or grad school and continue to use them in research.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#68Cisco prices from 2013 SP-SW-LMIX0CH0 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wind, Per Unit $65.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Linux, Per 10 $325.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CHW SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Wwind, Per 10 $325.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CH1 SP BASE Chez Scheme Dev Env for Apple Mac,Per 10 $325.00 SP-SW-LMIX0CHA SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00 SP-SW-LMX01CHL SP BASE Chez Scheme Developm $65.00
The $65-per-seat price was listed by a third-party Cisco vendor. There's never been any explanation as to how they came up with that price, nor whether anyone tried to purchase it that way. It was fun to tell people to get a license, especially given the normal prices (which someone else posted).
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>1) It sure is awkward to represent struct fields 1 2 3 as (cdr struct), (cadr struct), (caddr) Every Scheme implementation I know of supports record types aka SRFI-9[0]. No one actually makes new data types from cons cells. >2) Scheme code is very imperative! Scheme supports many programming paradigms. Imperative programming is one. Functional programming, object-oriented programming, and relational programming are…
OK, point taken about #1. It is valuable to have the basic axioms and then separate syntactic sugar. But #2 and #3 are what I would call bootstrapping problems... in other words, there is a reason that C is the foundation of computing rather than Lisp. I don't think anybody really thinks otherwise anymore. But for example, set-cdr! is not in the lambda calculus, and you need it even for basic things. Likewise, Scheme…
>there is a reason that C is the foundation of computing rather than Lisp. I don't think anybody really thinks otherwise anymore.
C is not the foundation of computing. Why would you say this?
>Likewise, Scheme implementations have mutable hash tables, but they're written in C and not Scheme.
A native code compiler written in Scheme would have its hash table implementation also written in Scheme.
>I don't know how you even write a hash table based on cons cells rather than O(1) indexing.
You wouldn't do that! Cons cells are not the only primitive data type! Another primitive type in Scheme is the vector, which is a mutable array.
I'm sorry, but you greatly misunderstand Lisp and how compilers work.
Re: Chez Scheme is now free
#70It's about time! Although I'm curious---how did Cisco end up owning it?
The short version: Dybvig left his faculty position at Indiana at the end of 2012 to join Cisco, and Cisco bought Cadence Research Systems (the company set up for licensing Chez Scheme), too. There's an FTC filing somewhere, but my Google-fu is failing me.