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I'm curious about what MIT Scheme's reader was doing wrong at the time, and whether or not it's been fixed. Does anyone know? Are most Scheme readers equally ba
by groovy2shoes 15y ago
I'm curious about what MIT Scheme's reader was doing wrong at the time, and whether or not it's been fixed. Does anyone know? Are most Scheme readers equally bad?
- brlewis 15y agoThis story takes place in Fall 1992 ( http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic_id=27&topic=NE43+Memory+Project http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a.tcl?topic_id=27&#... ) so I'd be really surprised if MIT Scheme hasn't fixed it. Sussman's readiness to kill the MIT Scheme project at that point indicates to me that he thought other implementations were less buggy, e.g. mzscheme (later PLT, later Racket). But admittedly I'm reading sense into the story when there might not be any. The story was written more than 5 years after it occurred, and written hastily. For example, either "300,000 phone numbers" is wrong or "30Mbyte file" is wrong.
- groovy2shoes 15y agoThanks for the info. One of the commenters in the OP mentioned that the reader in MIT Scheme was still buggy/slow in 1998, but I've been having trouble finding any MIT Scheme releases that are that old. I've never had any trouble with any Scheme reader, but then again I've never used one on pre-1998 hardware!
- kragen 15y agoAha, thanks for the metadata. I'm surprised my 1992 date was so right-on; I'd given it two-year error bars. I think that in general Philip is more interested in telling good stories than in being sure they are accurate. There is at least one example of people who claim their careers have been ruined by this attribute of his.