[MIT-Scheme-devel] A tellurion for the faithful.

[Matt Birkholz]

Bless me, Schemers, for I have Schemed.

It has been 13 months since my last confession and I am please to say
myriad minions of Chaos have fled or been destroyed by my hand.

GNOME 3.0 stirred up a flurry of the little devils, yet I prevailed.

The resizing of Gtk-Screens was plagued by weirdness, especially after
I added re-size handles between the windows.  I had to re-program the
little geometry protocol brains out of GtkScrolledWindow and GtkPaned.
Their friendlier specializations, GtkScrolledView and GtkPanedView,
now serve faithfully.

The disappearance of type code SEQUENCE-3 and renaming of SEQUENCE-2
to "SEQUENCE" is just the kind of demon to frustrate cross-
compilation with our released version 9.1.  I gave that terror the
slip by cross-compiling with 9.1.99 (aka master), which is hip to the
SEQUENCE thang and can be built using 9.1.

There is now a gtk-graphics device supporting the graphics interface
in the reference manual.  It does not support many custom operations
like the x-graphics type, YET.  If anyone knows of any reason it
SHOULD, now is the time to speak.

Thanks to Brother Arthur I was able to complete a simple hymn -- a
tellurion:

    http://birkholz.chandler.az.us/tellurion.png

It can be drawn on the simplest graphics device (a plotter?) but looks
best on a gtk-graphics device.  It is intended to be portickle and
will someday fit into an (r3rs) package with a handful of imports.  It
is a song of praise AND a lesson in how easily LARGE amounts of heap
can be consumed by flonums.  By default the tellurion "app" updates
every 15 minutes.  With the default heap it has to garbage collect
twice to do so!

All of this nonsense is available on the Gtk (and Gtk-Screen) branches
of my repository.

    git://birkholz.chandler.az.us/~matt/mit-scheme.git

Yours in Scheme,
-Friar Puck

Tellurion: "an apparatus to illustrate the causation of day and night
by the rotation of the earth on its axis and the dependence of the
seasons on the sun's declination" --Merriam-Webster