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A comment on Cyclone Scheme.

Re:Cyclone Scheme by dpc_pw on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:12PM (#24701842)
One thing I'll never understand about Scheme/Lisp is why they need so many versions (of the standard, and of different compilers).
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Re:Cyclone Scheme by nerdponx on Tuesday October 06, 2020 @04:24PM (#24701957)
I don't think it's entirely a matter of "need". All these implementations are independent projects.

Some of them include their own features on top of the standard. Some of them focus on specific use cases and/or optimize for specific performance characteristics. Some of them are toy projects.

How many C implementations/compilers are there? Even Python (which has a massive and often ill-defined spec) has multiple implementations.

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Re:Cyclone Scheme by dpc_pw on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @02:48AM (#24705890)
> How many C implementations/compilers are there?

I can compile same source code with pretty much any C compiler. I might be wrong, but the lisp compilers are all "slightly different". I guess scheme ones can be the same? But are they really?

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Re:Cyclone Scheme by nerdponx on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @11:17AM (#24709121)
That's fair, until you get into GCC extensions. I guess the difference is that the Scheme "core" is typically smaller and the amount of extensions is typically larger.

See also: Common Lisp, which has a similar problem.

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