[racket] Scheme's place in the world

From: Hugh Aguilar (hughaguilar96 at yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Nov 21 22:35:57 EST 2012

I am familiar with STAAPL. It looks pretty cool! 

It is for the PIC18 which is largely obsolete now. Tom told me that he might upgrade to the PIC24, but I'm not aware that he has done so yet. The PIC18 is more powerful than the AVR8 that is used in the Arduino (and I don't know what you mean by "Processing"). I like MicroChip as they provide very good development tools and customer service --- although the PIC18 isn't exactly cutting edge anymore, it is still a reasonable choice.

Tom's system isn't truly Forth, because the user can't write compile-time code in Forth as is generally expected, but must write that stuff in Scheme --- only the run-time code is written in Forth. Still though, it looked pretty interesting. Now that I'm getting into Scheme, I may delve into STAAPL myself as a learning exercise --- I might be able to borrow ideas for my own system. :-)

Are there any other compilers written in Scheme? From what I've learned about Scheme so far, it seems like a pretty good language for writing a compiler. The books that I've read on compiler-writing assume C or Pascal (or Java for ANTLR) --- but I haven't seen any using Scheme or Lisp. Of course, Scheme/Lisp have always been used for writing a DSL inside of a program (as Dmitry is doing in Racket, and has often been done in Forth), but what I'm referring to here is cross-compiling to a processor target --- not just putting a syntax-layer on top of an existing Scheme system.



________________________________
 From: Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com>
To: Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> 
Cc: Hugh Aguilar <hughaguilar96 at yahoo.com>; "users at racket-lang.org" <users at racket-lang.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2012 9:52 AM
Subject: Re: [racket] Scheme's place in the world
 
You should look at Staapl:

http://zwizwa.be/staapl/

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 9:43 AM, Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> wrote:
> Other than Straight Forth... what would you say is the best Forth
> available right now for someone wanting to get started with Forth and
> on real hardware? I'm interested in that vs something like Arduino and
> Processing for example.
>
> From what I read, and from what a good buddy of mine who is a Forth
> person and also a Lisp person... Scheme and Forth are spiritually very
> close and truly "hacker" languages moreso than everything else out
> there.
> ____________________
>   Racket Users list:
>   http://lists.racket-lang.org/users



-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93
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