Re: What's so cool about Scheme?

[Russ Ross <address@hidden>]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 10:31:59AM -0700, Steve Dekorte wrote:
> 
> On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 10:02 AM, Russ Ross wrote:
> >>Which Scheme would result in a smaller code base? Scheme48 is about 
> >>25K
> >>lines of code. Given that the book makes no mention(I didn't see
> >>anything and there's not index entry) of garbage collection, I assume
> >>the code base would need to include Scheme itself for the runtime?
> >
> >How many lines of code in the gcc distribution or in glibc?
> 
> Does Scheme not use libc?

I assume most C implementations of Scheme use libc, but I think you
missed my point (or I missed yours).  I'm not suggesting that Scheme
relies on fewer lines of code than C, but rather that it doesn't
really matter in either case.  There are numerous abstraction layers
at work here from the hardware (memory, cache layers, processor,
etc.) through the OS and standard user-level library components up
to the individual applications.  The beauty of abstraction layers is
that when they work right you can ignore everything below the
current layer.

- Russ