[plt-scheme] ? support for SICM ?

From: Brian Beckman (brianbec at microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Dec 18 13:45:54 EST 2002

Sorry if this is FAQ -- 

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

I have been hand-translating the samples in the book into "Mathematica",
a programming language with adequate plotting and graphing support and
somewhat-less-than-adequate functional programming support.

Much nicer would be a more standard base and implementation of scmutils
-- say on PLT Scheme?  Of course, I would like a free car and a house to
go with that please :)

Humor aside, I was wondering if anyone in the PLT community had given a
thought to building such a thing?  It would be a shame were such a
lovely book as SICM to wither on the vine because such a tiny fraction
of soloists such as myself -- lacking Linux sysadmin support -- would be
able to work with any of the software in the book.

Brian Beckman


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