[plt-scheme] ? support for SICM ?

Brian Beckman wrote:
> I have been working through Sussman's and Workman's wonderful book SICM
> (Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics) and I would love
> to be able to run the programs in the book, however, they use an
> extremely idiosyncratic Scheme dialect (MIT Scheme) with a critical
> numerical and graphical library (scmutils) that runs only on a single
> platform (Redhat Linux 7.0 I think), and I cannot justify a
> single-purpose computer (and its space reqts and sysadmin time reqts)
> just for this book.

This suggestion falls far into the "pragmatic" rather than "elegant" side of
the spectrum, but for this sort of problem, I use VMware (www.vmware.com) to
run a virtual copy of the necessary OS - it works very well.  You might find
it comes in handy for other purposes too - it allows you to suspend and
later resume OS sessions, make runnable copies of a particular configuration
of an OS install, etc.

> I would be spending all my time fiddling with
> computer hardware and configuration rather than
> programming and thinking :)

Setting up a VM running some OS for a dedicated purpose like this doesn't
typically create much of a sysadmin overhead - running the default install
of the OS and the application in question is usually all you need.

Anton