[CM] on guile etc

[Bill Schottstaedt]

> Out of curioustity, what are the advantages of moving cm into guile/scheme,

and

> Concerning the scheme environment: I recently made some experiences
> with siod and found out that it is far away from scheme reference
> manuals I found in the net, (e.g. lacking a lot of functions). I got
> the impression, that scheme in general is somewhat cleaner, but it
> seemed less standarized and with a lot less functionality as it is
> lacking all the bells and whistles of keywords, optional parameters
> and the whealth of built in macros and functions of cltl2. You can
> probably add the lisp functionality with libraries but then you'd end
> up with yet another lisp dialect which again isn't standarized. Is my
> impression right or did I look into the wrong direction?


This is basically right, although the "bells and whistles" are
implemented mostly in Scheme in Guile.  Some of the standardization
comes through the glacial SRFI process that seems to be the norm in
Scheme.  I think that SIOD is very old and has evolved to suit
Gimp(?), which doesn't look so bad from my vantage point...  The
advantages are: scheme (via guile anyway) does not make real-time work
impossible, it is (relatively) small, it is free, the FFI to C is very
good, and the tie-ins to various user-interface libraries have been
provided by yers truly; so there's no obvious road-block to further
development.  The drawbacks are: no compiler and none in sight at this
time (the interpreter runs at basically the same speed as ACL's
interpreter), the object system is sui generis and incomplete,
and guile itself has degenerated into pointless bickering.  I have
looked into other Schemes and CLs, but none that I can find are an
improvement.