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`scheme-script' and multiple Scheme installations

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 22 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 22 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



I have a basic problem with the specification of 'scheme-script' as
the *official* SRFI-22 name for the Scheme script interpreter. I
personally have 10 different schemes installed (S2 *is* a portability
project) of which 7 have (intentionally) useful scripting
interfaces. Of those, perhaps 4 are R5RS 'out of the box' (e.g. PLT
requires that you load a special library module to get hygienic
macros). *All* of them extend Scheme in different ways s.t. I would
prefer to use PLT for a script that did GUI interactions (as I would
use wish) but I'd use Scsh for the anything doing IETF RFC networking
(because of the excellent SUNET package).

I just don't see how forcing them all to use a single name in 'exec'
space will help anything. I'd prefer to look at 'scheme-script' as a
meta-name, because frankly, none of R5RS, SRFI-0, or SRFI-7 provides
enough functionality to do significant scripting. We all already knew
that, or we wouldn't be working on SRFIs, but until the day that there
is a regexp SRFI, a socket SRFI, etc I think that maintaining some
flexibility in the precise choice of interpreter is important.

Perhaps the *logical* conclusion is that this SRFI is misguided, but I
don't really think so. The standardization of command-line args and
invocation conventions would greatly ease the mental burden of writing
scripts for *any* implementation (since *every* implementation must
address those issues). I would just like to see the door left open for
utilizing multiple implementations.

david rush
-- 
To get anywhere with programming we must be free to discuss and
improve subjective phenomena. and leave the objective metrics to
resultants such as bug reports.
	-- The Programmer's Stone (Alan Carter & Colston Sanger)