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Domain: r6rs.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to r6rs.org.

Comments · 5

  1. Re:Indiana, not Indian by 10101001+10101001 · · Score: 1 · on Harlan: a Language That Simplifies GPU Programming

    According to the story it is Indiana University, not Indian University.

    See, that makes a lot more sense. :)

    I wonder if scheme was in some way necessary or conducive to running on the gpu, or if that was an arbitrary choice.

    I'd say it's a mixture of both. On the one hand, Professor R. Kent Dybvig is one of the editors behind R6RS (and earlier editions) and author of Chez Scheme. In general, IU uses Scheme as one of the major languages to teach things including compiler design, so basically a CS alumni from IU is almost always a Schemer (or perhaps an anti-Schemer from the experience :)). That boils down to the point that Scheme is basically a much simplified version of Lisp (basically, the reverse of Lisp in complexity) which can function as a functional language (with all the inherent thread-safe features) if you're careful about not using mutable functions on your data, and Scheme readily supports 1st order and anonymous functions. Given that GPUs (and Cell processors) are basically very apt for those properties, it'd seem to be quite a good fit. Having said all that, there's probably plenty of other functional languages that are as good or even better for the job--the very scope of Scheme being such a cut down language good for teaching also tends to make it a pain to actually use in any production environment because of a lack of libraries, so I hope Harlan is designed to hand off the non-GPU work to another language.

    I still have nightmares of car and cdr from way back when.

    Can't really help you there. Personally, car and cdr ended up making linked-list so intuitive for me that I'm often perplexed why anyone has so much trouble with them, especially with memory leaks and the like. :/

  2. Re:Uhhhh by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Informative · on R7RS Scheme Progress Report

    It's what Slashdot is supposed to be.

    If you're having problems, then maybe you should go and read the first 218 pages:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R6RS#R6RS
    http://www.r6rs.org/

  3. Re:Ahhh... It's been a while... by Synerg1y · · Score: 0 · on R7RS Scheme Progress Report

    Lol, you know what this sounds like? A bunch of suits discussing mvc without knowing a line of underlying code. "We want it to be multi-platform, robust, dynamic, and future proof"

    Of course the final product runs on Solaris and requires a nightly reboot, you know?

    I know of schemes like XML??? Good luck replacing that...

    Then there's this kind of gibberish when I actually try and figure r7rs out...
    http://lists.r6rs.org/pipermail/r6rs-discuss/2009-September/004913.html

    Conclusion: r7rs is a rhetorical play on acronyms .

  4. Re:Scheme by DragonWriter · · Score: 1 · on Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language?

    If it's scheme you're looking for, there's R5RS and the SRFIs

    Or R6RS, depending on which side of that schism you fall on.

  5. Re:The more I learn about JavaScript... by Raenex · · Score: 1 · on GWT in Action

    So implement closures with reflections... Not so easy, is it? Implement a type system in Javascript that gives me the power of Eclipse. Not so easy, is it?

    I prefer flexibility. I think it's easier to build a restrictive subset of a flexible language than it is to tack on flexibility to a restrictive language. I prefer a language that is practical and makes it as easy as possible to use 3rd party libraries together. Take Scheme, for instance. That was the language out of which all the "Lambda the Ultimate" papers came out of, a language that prides itself on minimalism. Just a few days ago the new version of Scheme was ratified. It was something of an identity crisis for Scheme. There are lots of problems writing portable, composable code in Scheme, and the new version tried to address it, but at the cost of flexibility and simplicity.

    Will Clinger's apology is an interesting read. In it he describes first why he is going to vote yes (he later votes no because of last minute changes), and this is from the guy known for the quote: "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary."

    Quote from the above apology: "When evaluating the R6RS, I look at it as a programmer who has written, is maintaining, and wants to write more portable programs and libraries in Scheme. [...] The proposed R6RS offers improvement in several areas where absent or weak or incompatible standards have been making it unnecessarily difficult to write portable programs and libraries."