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Re: Standard Shell?

To: scsh@martigny.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Standard Shell?
From: shivers@ai.mit.edu (Olin Shivers)
Date: 29 Mar 1996 00:11:04 -0500
Organization: Artificial Intelligence Lab, MIT
Reply-to: shivers@ai.mit.edu
   From: sgml@winternet.com (Copernican Solutions Incorporated)
   Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme.scsh

   Would it be possible to define a "standard" for scsh?  This way other
   scheme interpreters could pick up the syntaxes/procedures and support
   scheme-based scripting.

Sure. The standard scsh API is documented in the scsh manual, and the
Scheme Underground implementation is fully compliant, I'm proud to say.

   I have been working with the authors of STK to create a cross-platform
   version that is supported in the WIN32 environment.  Scheme-based
   scripting would be of great benifit for programing in both the 
   unix and WIN32 world.

Note that scsh is *by design* Unix-specific. Part of its raison d'etre is
to expose *all* of Unix to the programmer. If you can do it in Unix from C,
you should be able to do it in scsh.

What you are after here is an excellent, but somewhat different, goal:
a systems-programming API in Scheme that would be sufficiently high-level
to permit support on Win32 *and* Unix. This would necessarily obscure
some of the details of the low-level OS-specific interface.

I think this would be neat. The way I would do it would be to start from
scratch, and re-do the entire scsh design effort for the Win32 API. That is
step 1. Call it WinScsh. Step 2: Write a set of S48 modules that can be
implemented on top of either the Unix or Win32 scsh modules. Now, if the
programmer writes code using just these libs, his code will run on either
platform.

This would be a fine thing. But also a lot of work. And I do not know the
Win32 API (yet).
        -Olin

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