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Chez Scheme is now free

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Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#111

Post by ams6110 »

niccaluim wrote: post #105

Wow, this takes me back. I took intro CS at IU in 1993. At that time they were still teaching Scheme, using George Springer's Scheme and the Art of Programming and something like The Little Schemer (but not that because I guess it didn't come out for another two years). Delightful language with a really clean library. I always found Common Lisp's naming conventions to be—dare I say it?—PHP-esque in their irregularity…

The Little LISPer (precursor to the Little Schemer) was definitely in print and used at IU in the 1980s. Maybe that was it?

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#112

Post by groovy2shoes »

kmill wrote: post #76
davexunit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are legitimate reasons why scheme isnt a very practical language The operating system I currently run uses a Scheme program as its init system and a Scheme program as its package manager. Scheme is a practical language.

To be fair to perception, that Scheme (Guile, I'd imagine) isn't exactly the subset of MIT-Scheme used in SICP.

SICP 2e sticks to IEEE Scheme.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#113

Post by groovy2shoes »

hga wrote: post #8
FraaJad wrote: post #2

IIRC, 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.

And aside from the JVM implementations and some works in progress the last time I checked, the only one with native instead of green threading.

I know Gauche uses pthreads because I got a linker error about it one time ;)

Also, does Gambit not support native threads? That's surprising considering Marc Feeley did quite a bit of research on multiprocessing in Scheme, and he wrote the SRFI for threads.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#114

Post by groovy2shoes »

FraaJad wrote: post #2

IIRC, 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.

Scheme user here. I'm very excited about this, and I think I just changed my vacation plans for next week :D

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#115

Post by kkylin »

FraaJad wrote: post #2

IIRC, 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.

Can't say (yet). I've used a number of implementations: Gambit, MIT Scheme, PLT/Racket, and played around with Chicken. But never Chez, because it wasn't free.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#116

Post by chubot »

clacke2 wrote: post #106
chubot wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is the foundation of computing in the sense that essentially every programming language and operating system is written in C or C++, and those are the tools that enable every other piece of software. More precisely, I would say that C is the foundation of software; it's how we stopped throwing out our programs when we changed computers. The first portable operating system kernels were written in C. I guess I could…

> To actually be bootstrapped, they had to add all this other stuff like vectors and hash tables. Just like C had to add things like arrays to the Turing machine? C doesn't even have hash tables in the spec! According to your definitions, C is a toy language.

No, because it's possible to implement efficient hash tables with C's primitives -- in fact that's how hash tables in essentially ALL languages ARE implemented.

cons cells are not sufficient to implement hash tables. Scheme needs arrays for that. cons cells can be implemented efficiently using arrays, but the converse isn't true, so arrays are more fundamental in some sense.

If you don't care about algorithmic efficiency, then you could choose either cons cells or arrays as your primitive. But obviously we do care, so arrays were the right choice. IOW, C was the right choice, not Scheme.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#117

Post by groovy2shoes »

iheartmemcache wrote: post #22
brianobush wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at scheme.com, you will see Copyright © 2011 Cadence Research Systems. Cisco bought Cadence back in 2012.

(Cadence for those who don't know are basically the equivalent of SolidWorks for anything in EE. They are the only company ( maybe Synopsis or Mentor, but I think there are a few holes here and there) on the planet that lets you go from designing something as simple and low level as an analog jellybean op-amp (with state of the art EM and S-param simulation) and verification, to RTL design (full power simulation and…

Synopsys definitely has offerings for all of those things. IC Validator also completely blows both Cadence's and Mentor's offerings out of the water when it comes to DRC and LVS, although Calibre from Mentor Graphics has more market share in that area at the moment (though I think ICV might be slowly picking up steam when it comes to market share).

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#118

Post by niccaluim »

ams6110 wrote: post #111
niccaluim wrote: post #105

Wow, this takes me back. I took intro CS at IU in 1993. At that time they were still teaching Scheme, using George Springer's Scheme and the Art of Programming and something like The Little Schemer (but not that because I guess it didn't come out for another two years). Delightful language with a really clean library. I always found Common Lisp's naming conventions to be—dare I say it?—PHP-esque in their irregularity…

The Little LISPer (precursor to the Little Schemer) was definitely in print and used at IU in the 1980s. Maybe that was it?

That must've been it.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#119

Post by nickpsecurity »

chubot wrote: post #64
davexunit wrote: post #58

Earlier 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"

That's a myth. Try using first-hand sources like the papers from people who designed BCPL, B, and C to understand why it's that way. Answer: terrible hardware back then. That's it. Its popularity was result of prevalence of terrible hardware and that UNIX was written in C. I broke it's history down in just a few pages with a timeline and references here:

http://pastebin.com/UAQaWuWG

Likewise, before the social effect, the OS's were coded in a number of HLL's with capabilities UNIX lacked. Languages included ALGOL, PL/0, and Pascal. Later, they were done in Modula, Oberon, Ada, Fortran (yeah lol), LISP, and so on as hardware improved beyond 1970's minicomputers. Here's some UNIX alternatives and their capabilities that developed... some of which you still don't have. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020

Far as LISP, it's been implemented in hardware multiple times. This included naive ones that worked like a simple evaluator with garbage collection built into the memory-management unit. There was also one that had four specialized units for more sophisticated execution. One Scheme was designed and mathematically verified using the DDD toolkit that was also LISP if I recall.

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/pub/techreports/TR544.pdf

Oh heck, forgot they did it with VLISP. That was a Scheme48 interpreter and PreScheme compiler rigorously verified for correctness. PreScheme was a Scheme subset for systems programming. So, the work actually took a verified Scheme then mechanically derived verified HW from that Scheme code using a LISP-based tool. I recall from other papers they got it working on a FPGA and some PAL's.

Whereas, I don't know many small teams producing verifiable C code on verifiable C processors from verifiable C tools. Nah, I don't think your favorite language is anywhere near where you think it is. I don't even find LISP ideal here by far. It just did more in functionality & bare metal. Also, first LISP machine was started when UNIX was released interesting enough.

Re: Chez Scheme is now free

#120

Post by nickpsecurity »

coldtea wrote: post #79
davexunit wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> C is not the foundation of computing. Why would you say this? Because all the popular OSes, drivers, userlands, servers, GUI libraries, and compilers/languages are 99% written in C (or C++ which is close enough).

That's different. It means C is the most popular language in system programming. Makes so much sense when I explain above that C's prevalence is due to social and economic reasons given you argued it won a popularity contest. Hillary and Trump are also winning those right now if you want to argue how logical correctness and utility are connected to popularity. ;)
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