[plt-scheme] Industrial strength interpreters with Scheme?

Grant Rettke wrote:

> Lately I've been investigating books that use Scheme for implementing
> interpreters. As part of this investigation I've been reading comments
> on books that fall into this category,  and a common criticism is that
> a book "does not demonstrate how to implement \"real world\"
> interpreters, but only \"toy interpreters\"".
> 
> Said comments of course do not point in the direction of books that do
> fulfill this aim, or elaborate on what makes interpreters \"real
> world\".
> 
> What is your take on this? Are there books on this topic?

This is exactly the sort of mentality that leads people to dismiss the 
use of Scheme in education as opposed to Java or C++. Much of what is 
done in education can be characterized as "toy" as opposed to 
"real-world", but there is a reason for this. Separating the ideas from 
obscuring details makes it easier to learn both. There's a metaphor I 
like to use, which involves standing outside a building trying to get to 
the roof. You can climb up the outside or you can go in and take the 
stairs to the roof. You're in the real world, climbing up the outside, 
but it's a long way down.

You posted earlier about algorithms, which is my area of research, but 
before the digest reached me, Shriram gave an excellent survey to which 
I could not add a single qualifying word. So let me try a symmetrical 
task, though I suspect my response will not be as complete.

I found that working through the interpreters in Shriram's PLAI text 
taught me a lot, even after several years of teaching using Scheme and 
reading various texts and research papers. I didn't use his type system; 
instead, I reimplemented his interpreters using s-expressions for the 
source language and match.ss for the cases, trying not to look at his 
code and mechanically "translate" it but instead to rederive it from the 
principles articulated in the text. I like his balance of features added 
to the source language, features used from the implementation language, 
and intermediate steps in the derivation process.

I believe that this got me to the point where I can appreciate the 
somewhat different approaches of other authors, notably the later 
material in both editions of EOPL by Friedman, Wand, Haynes, and Lisp In 
Small Pieces by Queinnec. Current and classic research papers are also 
making more sense to me. I think I am ready for "real-world" details.

You could, of course, just start poring through the source code of any 
of the many open-source Scheme interpreters. But it's a long way down. --PR