[racket] Gambit Scheme for the iPhone and iPad

On 6/4/11 10:55 PM, Nevo wrote:

> Have you by chance bought that app and
> actually run on your iPhone/iPad?

Yes. It's only 99 cents. I have not used it extensively, since I only 
noticed it yesterday afternoon. Also I have not used my iPad in general 
extensively! I put it on my iPhone also, just for the amusement factor.

> I just wonder whether this is console
> based REPL only, or having graphics support as DrRacket does, how is the
> performance (pure interpreter mode or JIT enabled?).

Console-based REPL, with a script editor, as Richard has pointed out. I 
have not tested performance, but the iPad 2 is fairly powerful, and 
Gambit Scheme has always had good performance, so I expect it will be 
quite credible.

> I'm not clear if
> Apple actually ever has explicitly restricted applications bundled with
> a programming language interp, but they seems disallowing application to
> download *script* or other executable files from other places.

I believe that Apple's restrictions in the past made this impossible, 
but they relaxed them last June, and people are testing the waters. You 
can currently cut-and-paste to/from the script editor, and I have found 
a port of an older version of Python to the iPhone/iPad that in its 
first revision supports file syncing through iTunes (which Gambit Scheme 
does not, yet). But dynamic downloading of code is not permitted, still. 
So, while Gambit has an open-url function, there is probably no way to 
get data from the Web into a Scheme program, as opposed to bringing up a 
browser.

> I think we can provide a DrRacket like programming/educating/developing
> environment.

I can't speak to how easy this might be to achieve, or whether it's 
really worth the effort, but having the student languages available in 
an iPhone/iPad app would be quite compelling. --PR