[plt-scheme] PLT vs. the world

On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 5:46 PM, i j <laplacian42 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm brand new to Scheme.

Welcome!

> Can you please tell me what the PLT story is?

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from this tropic port,
Aboard this tiny Ship.  ....

> My impression so far is that PLT consists of a group of motivated
> individuals who want to use Scheme as a productive general purpose
> language, and so a number of features have been added to facilitate
> that.

That's about it. We also tend to be academics.

> Are the changes/additions that PLT makes fluid and subject to
> improvement later on? Or are they cast in stone, locked into
> backward-compatibility requirements?

They are fluid, but we try to be somewhat careful with backwards
compatibility. In major releases, there are often major changes and we
provide porting guides (and sometimes backwards compatible macros are
possible to help with that). We've been thru 4 of those in the last 14
or so years.

> Does PLT support the SRFI's (which I'm just learning about) or does
> PLT go off in its own direction?

It supports many. This is not an exclusive or. :)

> Also, is there a PLT-specific faq or community-edited wiki anywhere
> where I might find these questions answered? I see that PLT has
> substantial docs, but did not find a link to a FAQ or wiki.

I think that the Scheme cookbook (http://schemecookbook.org/) is the
closest thing. There are also user-contributed libraries on PLaneT
(http://planet.plt-scheme.org/), which plays some of the role those
would play. See also http://www.plt-scheme.org/community.html .

hth,
Robby