Re: [Chicken-users] functions for hash tables

[Ed Watkeys]

On Jan 26, 2005, at 4:01 PM, Larry White wrote:

> A third ideal to aspire to is ease of porting between scheme
> implementations.  I would like to be able to develop with MzScheme and
> have the option of deploying with chicken.

I too would like to live in a world where switching Scheme 
implementations didn't require tedious string replacements and argument 
re-ordering, however I believe that there may be a simpler approach to 
achieving it than risking sacrificing the principle of internal 
consistency.

When I started working programming in Scheme, I was amazed to find that 
there weren't any standard procedures that returned the implementation 
name and version. With such a mechanism, it would be much easier to 
re-define procedures to ensure that your MzScheme code will execute in 
Chicken.

(cond
 ((eq? (scheme-implementation) 'mzscheme)) ; do nothing
 ((eq? (scheme-implementation) 'chicken)
  (define hash-table-put hash-table-set)
  ; and whatever else...
))

Providing a framework for this sort of porting solution is do-able, 
while making Chicken compatible with many mutually-incompatible Schemes 
is difficult if not impossible.

I think conversations like these lead to the realization that at some 
level, the Common Lisp folks are right, and some sort of standard 
library definition is called for.

Ed