Joy! Bliss!

FINALLY!!!

My weekend hobby is at an end! Thanks to a message on a mailer group, I found an implementation of Scheme that works on AMD Linux!!!! It's called Gauche, and it's apparently written and maintained by one guy in Japan.

I'm very very happy about this! It even has decent string and regex implementations, so I can do pretty much anything I need for CompLing-related stuff.

Downsides: it's really only for scripting (i.e. interpreter, no compiler...not that Python is any different), and there isn't a GUI library (not that that's really all that important). But these are only minor headaches. For the kinds of things I need Scheme for on this machine (mostly to do Friedman's homework, maybe some other personal projects), I don't need a compiler and definitely don't need GUIs.

So I'm pleased. Of course, it's still worth, as an independent project, trying to get a Scheme compiler of my own working. But I doubt I'll have time to do that this semester really.

For now, I'm very happy I at least have SOMETHING. DrScheme still works on the Mac I have, so if I really need GUIs for any Scheme application I can just use that.

One cloud on the horizon. The message that led me to Gauche was from 2004. That means 2 years on and still no support for AMD Linux from PLT and Chez. Which makes it a good bet it's not coming anytime soon. Too bad.