RE: aspiring language architect seeks Scheme implementation

["Anton van Straaten" <address@hidden>]

Seth Gordon wrote:
> Since I have more experience with Scheme than with Common (or any
> other dialect of) Lisp, I want to start by getting a Scheme
> interpreter, writing one of the Scheme implementations from _Lisp in
> Small Pieces_ on top of it, and then modifying my implementation
> incrementally until I have a language with all of the features I want.
>
> So I'm looking for a Scheme implementation-plus-libraries that would
> be appropriate for that first step.

I'll second Matthias F's "completely unbiased" recommendation of PLT Scheme.
As a mere PLT user, rather than an author, I am even more completely
unbiased than Matthias is (therefore my opinion holds more weight? :)

I've been working through Lisp in Small Pieces myself recently, using PLT
Scheme.  Meroon (or Meroonet, the subset used in the book) seems to work
fine under PLT - I've experienced the odd quirk, but nothing difficult to
fix.  I'm currently playing with the Chapter 7 bytecode compiler and its
interpreter, for example, and that works great.

I think PLT should meet the requirements you specified quite well, although
I don't have personal experience with Emacs integration.  PLT development is
very active - they have one of the larger teams currently working on a
Scheme implementation, and their upcoming v200 release has lots of new
goodies.  The plt-scheme mailing list is low-noise, pretty low traffic, but
high-content.

BTW, if you're starting with Scheme, you have an edge over Arc already!!
<duck>

Anton