Re: [Chicken-users] future of chicken?

[Peter Keller]

On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 01:23:18PM -0500, William Annis wrote:
> 
>  >From: Peter Keller <address@hidden>
>  >
>  >Out of curiosity, what is the general roadmap for future of chicken?
>  >What features are to be added/fixed, improvements, things to be thought
>  >about, etc.
> 
>         I don't know if Pete has made this clear yet, but he and I
> have been having fantasies about things we want our Perfect Lisp to
> have.  Chicken was the lucky implementation in our search for the best
> Scheme to start with for the full corruption. :)

I've been caught! :)

Chicken really is a very nice system! It has worked very reliably for
me and has a very nice support group(felix included) that get bugs fixed
and questions answered in a timely fashion and a growing userbase. I mean
my hash-table request got done in like what, 4 hours? That is awesome!
I was sort of evaluating it for William and I to see how well it worked.
During the evaluation, I fell in love with it. :)

>         My main motivation is ARC (http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html)
> which includes some radical changes: replacing the wordy 'lambda' with
> 'fn' (making anonymous functions smaller and forcing less
> indentation); making 'if' anaphoric.  That is, have tests bind the
> answer to 'it' in the bodies of the "then" and "else" clauses.  Other
> sorts of things are at the ARC page.

See, it is kinda funny since in the comp.lang.scheme newsgroup,
felix had just written the only way to change anything was to do it
yourself. William and I agree wholeheartedly about this and decided to
both contribute as much as we can into chicken(the winner of our search
for an up to date reliable scheme implementation) so it has not only many
of the things we desire, but useful stuff other people can use too. This
is why I was speaking that crazy talk of a perl-like library. Some of
the things we would like to do are perl-like text processing, but we'd
like to do it in scheme with a convenient semantic.

So, the reason I was asking about the future was so William and I could
coordinate the things we would like to contribute to the future roadmap
of chicken. We don't want to duplicate effort with those other developers
contributing other codes as well.

-pete