Advocacy and Re: Octave and Guile?

[Friedrich Dominicus]

I'm probably not the right one to answer those questions. But I have
some thoughts based on your comments. But I would like to state that I
do think having good numerical facilities for Guile would be very nice
to have.

- you mentioned the syntax stuff, I would think if you use GUILE you
should provide facilities to do it the "Scheme" way.
- I do not know what the licening problems with Python are, but
than Ruby may be another option (www.ruby-lang.org), IIRC  it's GPLd

Now to my personal opinion. Although I'm using GUILE (because SCWM
uses it as it's programming language) I do like Common Lisp more. I do
not feel as comfortable as the other users of this list with Schemes. It's
just a matter of the usefullness of libraries and portability. If I
choose one of the Schemes I'm more or less bound. This may not be a
problem for people living and breathing GUILE. But I have simular
problems with my favourite language Eiffel. The cross compiler
portabilty is as bad as can be. And so people are re-inventing all
over again, all Eiffels are different. And if you like to have your
stuff working with all of them it wastes large amounts of time,
unecessarily.

There maybe a lot of Scheme programmer out there, but at least there
are more than 20 incompatible implementations. They all call themselv
Schemes but you can't hope taking something written for one to
another. 

Just an example. One can find on my computer at least three or four
Schemes. 
- Guile, because of SCWM
- SCSH, for Unix scripting. there is a module scsh around but again
things are different (module system....)
- DrScheme. Was there for learning. Of course I can not use it to
steer my window-manage nor use SCSH scripts
- Stk, just curious about the Tcl/Tk binding

Of course Schemes have the advantage that they get some job really
well done. E.g I think SCSH is a wonderful thing, but unfortunatly the
interative usage facilities are poor-> So I have to use some other
Shell -> again another way of doing programming. So I have to choose
among implementation which do one job well but are failing
elsewhere. And it's extremly difficult for me to remember what way it
is done in GUILE, or in SCSH etc. 
just an examples ist it (pwd) pwd (cwd)
(get-current-working-directory) (get-working-directory) or what? Of
course I can adapt them all to be (pwd) but how tedious and boring is that? 

If I know that in Common Lisp I can
be quite sure it will work on another Common Lisp too. That is an
advantage one can't underestimate.

Sorry for drifting away with that things. But as much as I learned to
like Lisp-ish languages those things get on my nerves, and let me
drift away from Scheme.

With best regards
Friedrich

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