Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] MIT Scheme for Mac OS X?

[Robert Love]

On Mar 9, 2005, at 9:54 PM, Taylor Campbell wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Robert Love wrote:
>
> > On Mar 9, 2005, at 8:47 AM, Steven Shaw wrote:
> >
> > > Probably drscheme/mzscheme, chicken and gambit are ones to consider.
> >
> > In my case, no, I don't think so.  The reason I need/want scheme is to
> > use it with a text  book by a scheme founder/fanatic.
>
> What textbook are you referring to?  Are you certain that it depends on
> MIT Scheme specifics?


The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics,
Sussman, Wisdom & Mayer


> >                                                        That the ads 
> > for
> > the textbook don't say it is for a restricted set of platforms seems
> > like false advertising at the least.
>
> MIT Scheme has not always been restricted to the x86.  That there have
> not been enough people working on it, however, to generate the effort
> necessary to maintain other ports is no fault of the textbook's author.
> In any case, nothing is going to be truly universally portable to all
> platforms, so it would be silly to advertise every piece of software
> ever written as only 'for a restricted set of platforms.'

I don't know, if the library, or set of routines that are intended to 
use with the book were in Perl, Python or Ruby that would would fit my 
definition of universal.  Even Guile might.   So, I do blame the 
authors for choosing a restrictive flavor of the language and then not 
advertising that before I bought the book.

I can argue the merits of the book and how the code base was chosen but 
perhaps this isn't the best forum.