Re: There is no SCAN (introducing Compan)

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

2016-09-18 16:17 GMT+02:00 Pascal J. Bourguignon <address@hidden>:

> Panicz Maciej Godek <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > Therefore, I wrote Compan, which is meant to be a "Community Package
> > Manager" for Guile.
>
> Unfortunately, it's specific to guile.
>
> I admit that I wrote that little module to solve my own problems -- I've
had various modules scattered around various repositories, and I was
dragging certain files from project to project, making slight modifications
between subsequent versions. It is not a part of "some greater idea", but I
believe that it somehow reflects the 'Zeitgeist du jour', so to speak.

Wouldn't it be better to have a system that could be used to distribute
> scheme libraries, including portable libraries and portability layers?
>
>
This surely sounds like a lot of work, but honestly I can't think of any
immediate benefit.

Granted, we may want to support r5rs, r6rs and r7rs libraries (perhaps
> some libraries can run on all those versions; after all, most r4rs
> libraries also ran on r5rs), in addition to the various common or main
> scheme implementations.
>
> I guess some basis for such a system could be quicklisp (
> http://quicklisp.org https://github.com/quicklisp ), which would have to
> be ported to scheme from Common Lisp (and yet, some parts such as
> infrastructure quicklisp-dist or quicklisp-controller wouldn't have to
> be translated, or only much later).


My impression is that the fundamental difference between Scheme and Common
Lisp is that Common Lisp tries to be practical before everything else,
while Scheme is essentially theoretical or conceptual or experimental.
Maybe R6RS was a leap towards practical systems, but I think that it's the
reason why the community resisted to accept it. Guile is also practical,
but in a different way: it is tightly integrated with C and UNIX.

I think that if there is any hope for a centralized repository with Scheme
modules, it would have to resemble wikipedia rather than CPAN -- the
modules would have to be "written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute".

Regards,
M.