Re: [Chicken-users] Re: Debian slander?

[Ivan Raikov]

  I do believe that the Stalin compiler supports general tail
recursion. Are you sure that you are talking about recent versions of
Stalin?

  The new version is better, but I still think that "... hundreds of
Chicken libraries ..." deserves its own sentence. Do you think you can
break up the sentence "The active and helpful ... " into something
more concise and manageable?

Oh, and apparently, "compliant" means that a system provides partial
support for a standard, and "conformant" means that a system has been
formally tested (and passed) against all requirements of the
standard. So it would be correct to say that Chicken is
R5RS-compliant, but not that it is R5RS-conformant, at least according
to the explanation in this blog post:

http://blogs.windriver.com/wilson/2006/11/compliance_vs_c.html



John Cowan <address@hidden> writes:

> Ivan Raikov scripsit:
>
>>   Isn't it redundant to say "The compiler ... supports tail
>> recursion"? After all, if the compiler didn't support tail recursion,
>> it wouldn't be a Scheme compiler. 
>
> Unfortunately no.  It is quite common for Scheme compilers not to be fully
> tail recursive.  For example, Kawa and Stalin are only tail recursive on
> self calls, and will run out of stack when general tail recursion is used.
> If it comes to that, first-class continuations are as required as tail 
> recursion,
> and few compilers to C (or Java) other than Chicken get that 100% right.
>
> Chicken Scheme combines an optimising compiler with a reasonably fast
> interpreter.  It supports almost all of R5RS and the important SRFIs.
> The compiler generates portable C code and supports tail recursion,
> first-class continuations, and lightweight threads, and the interface
> to and from C code is flexible, efficient, and easy to use.  The active
> and helpful Chicken community fixes bugs, provides support, and has
> contributed hundreds of Chicken libraries that make the programmer's
> task easier.  The interpreter allows interactive use, fast prototyping,
> debugging, and scripting.  Extensive documentation is supplied.