From:	 MJ Ray <markj@luminas.co.uk>
To:	 lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Some Scheme news for Linux Weekly News
Date:	 Tue, 09 Apr 2002 15:36:28 +0100

Standards

23 March saw publication of a new Scheme Request for Implementation.  Number
28 in this series of documents is "Basic Format Strings" by Scott G. Miller. 
Its draft and an archive of the ongoing discussion is available at
http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-28/

Work continues on reaffirming the IEEE language standard, led by Ray
Dillinger, helped by Mike Sperber.  See http://www.schemers.org/


Implementations

PLT-Scheme gained two new modules recently:

 * ssax.plt is a port of Oleg Kiselyov's SSAX interface by Neil Van Dyke,
largely following Kirill Lisovsky's porting plans.  It can be downloaded
from http://www.neilvandyke.org/ssax-plt/

 * Matt Jadud released XchemeRPC, an interface to XML-RPC, along with a good
tutorial at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~mjadud/papers/xchemerpc.html (I've
already used this to make a simple advogato upload script, listed at
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/software.html#other )

Both of these are for the v200 alpha releases.  Despite the name, it is
quite usable already.  http://download.plt-scheme.org/

Guile saw new releases of the SX 3D modeller and ttn's read-text-outline
Both available via http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/

Mid-March saw release 7.7.0 of MIT Scheme make its debut, herded out into
the open by Chris Hanson.  The biggest change is a complete rewrite of the
syntax engine.  It remains R4RS-compliant.  More details, downloads and
changelogs at http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/scheme/mit/


Other

LAML is a Scheme-based set of libraries for programmatic authoring of
complex WWW material, and for CGI programming. LAML features a set of
document types and tools, such as LENO, the Scheme Elucidator, and
SchemeDoc. The LAML home page is located at
http://www.cs.auc.dk/~normark/laml/

ACM SIGPLAN's 2002 Scheme workshop details are online at
http://scheme2002.ccs.neu.edu/  It is part of PLI2002
http://pli2002.cs.brown.edu/ on October 3-8 in Pittsburgh, USA.

Finally, suggested as a possible basis for future language implementations,
Qish contains a runtime with (rather generic & reusable) generational
copying garbage collector for and in C.  Source is under GPL license,
running on GNU/Linux. Current version is 0.1.  See
http://www.starynkevitch.net/Basile/qishintro.html
-- 
MJ Ray                                       Email:  markj@luminas.co.uk
Director                                       Tel:  +44 (0)870 741 6658
Luminas Internet Applications                  Fax:  +44 (0)700 598 1135
This is not an official statement or order.    Web:    www.luminas.co.uk