Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: sommerfeld@apollo.hp.com (Bill Sommerfeld)
Subject: Re: Why you should not use Tcl
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Date: Tue, 4 Oct 1994 16:42:28 GMT
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>   Actually, I'd say the main failing [with scheme] right now is a
>   lack of standardized functionality encompassing that found in the
>   ANSI C library, POSIX.1, and BSD sockets.  This does not have to
>   be (and shouldn't be) part of the base language... but it *should*
>   be a commonly-implemented extension.  Most, if not all, of this is
>   in perl already.

>Can you point to a language which has the facilities you want and for
>which there is more than one implementation of the language (e.g. this
>rules out Perl and TCL)?  

C.  It's widely implemented, and I can port systems-level code between
different UNIX implementations with any changes between systems
conditionalized in a way which allows me to have a single source base.
[Things were pretty bad on this front a number of years ago, but
things seem to be improving with the advent of ANSI C, POSIX, and the
like.]

>Alternately if you are happy with only ever using a single
>implementation of a language, then why not just add the features to
>-an- implementation of Scheme and forget about standardization (it
>seems to work for Perl and TCL!)?

I don't want to be in the business of supporting more of a toolset
than necessary.  Perl meets my goals for a lot of scripting jobs, but
so would a Scheme with a complete ANSI C library and POSIX binding.


