[Chicken-users] current state of affairs

[felix winkelmann]

Hi, folks!

Sorry, I was on vacation a few days and completely forgot to tell anybody,
so my apologies if my replies were late and/or missing.

Quite a lot of things have changd and I will release a new version
of Chicken (2.0) in the next days (in other words Really Soon Now...).

Most radical changes:

- syntax-case, srfi-25, srfi-37 and the test-infrastructure have been removed
  from the core system and have been turned into eggs. Only the most basic
  library units needed for the compiler, tools and the FFI still remain. 
- All compiler and interpreter options related to syntax-case/hygienic mode/r5rs
  mode and strictness stuff are gone
- Eggs that depend on syntax-case (and srfi-37) have been changed accordingly,
  chicken-setup should automatically do the right thing.
- For these reasons there hasn't been any update to the darcs repo or the
  egg's site recently - everything will be released in one go.
- The examples are gone as well - maintaining them for all the
different platforms
  got more and more painful.
- I hope those changes don't break too many things - if there are any problems
  with migrating to 2.0, I'll be happy to help. In fact using
syntax-case will become
  simpler, just compile/eval with "-R syntax-case" or put a "(use syntax-case)"
  in your code.
- A port of Andre van Tonders new macro and module system is basically working,
  this may be an interesting (yet still experimental) solution to the
compile-time vs.
  run-time problems of macros, macro-helper definitions and run-time issues.


cheers,
felix