[CM] CM port to Guile available

[rm@fabula.de]

On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 05:37:38PM -0500, Rick Taube wrote:
> A port of Common Music to Guile 1.5.6 on Lunix is available from the ccrma ftp server:
> 
>   ftp://ccrma-ftp.stanford.edu/pub/Lisp/cm/scm.tar.gz
> 
> The scheme version of CM requires Guile 1.5.4 or higher. You can get Guile 1.5.6 from the ccrma ftp server:
> 
>   ftp://ccrma-ftp.stanford.edu/pub/Lisp/guile-1.5.6.tar.gz
> 
> After restoring scm.tar.gz see the file scm/readme.text for information on building CM in Guile and for a list of changes to the system that the port necessitated. The good new is that really very little changed (from a user's perspective) and the vast majority of the implementation changes i did make are really for the better. The file scm/examples.cm is good place to start trying out cm in Guile.

Wow, this looks rather fun! I just downloaded the code (btw, any reason to call
it 'scm' - i'd rather prefer to have a "telling" name like cm-guile ;-)
Since i'm running the developer branch of guile (1.7.0) i had to add

 ;;; list* deprecated in newer guile -- use cons*

 (define list* cons*)

in file 'guile.scm'. After that the examples from file 'examples.cm' worked
without problems. 
I feel a bit uneasy about hardcoded path constants -- what do you think
about putting the code into one or more modules? (i've converted your 
loop code to a guile module a while ago, i'd be happy to send you the 
modiried code).


> I have to say that -- Guile's execution speed aside -- I like working in Scheme and Guile very much and I certainly prefer it over Clisp, CMU, and IBCL.  Maybe its me getting older but I appreciate the spare beauty of Scheme and how it forces you to pay attention to syntax (my mind tends to wander these days...)  But then again, as Gregor Kiczales said, "Scheme is such a beautiful
> language nobody can program in it."

Have you considered telling the guile folks about your project? Again i'd be
happy to post a short message to the guile mailing list and fill out the
guile project form. I think cm and snd are some imressive show-pieces for
guile.


[...]
> If anyone has ideas about these things or would like to help design and implement them please let me know.  I'd also like to know if Guile-1.5.6 could be Fink-ified to run on OSX and if it would be possible for Guile to run under Windows using the CYGWIN tool set. 

I'd not bother finkifying Guile-1.5 -- 1.6 should be out any moment now ;-)
And, as far as i can tell, there's no problem using that instead. I'm presonally
working on getting Guile to build under OSX (native, not Fink), and from 
recent posts in the Guile-Dev mailing list i sense that i'm not allone, so
there might be a port soon.

Nice vacation and thank's for the work

  Ralf Mattes