Subject: Re: Summary: Thoughts on implementing Scheme in C
From: rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)
Date: 2000/11/16
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <8v08h5$hvvpc$1@fido.engr.sgi.com>
Bill Richter  <richter@conley.math.nwu.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| Thanks, Oleg.  I'm interested in the other end of the spectrum.
| Matthias seems to have shown that strict portable C can't implementing
| Scheme in C well.  So I asked, what if you allow considerable
| relaxation of strict portable C?
+---------------

Then you have no problem! In practice, if you allow small amounts of
platform-dependent #ifdef's in your C code, you can write a Scheme
system that's *very* portable. That is, while in theory Scheme in C
isn't portable, in practice it really is. For example, Rice's MzScheme
is written in C, and runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000, MacOS, BeOS and
just about every Unix platform I can think of. Likewise, Elk, SCM,
and many other implementations run just fine on a large number of
diverse platforms.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 31-2-510		rpw3@sgi.com
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