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1 point by jmatt 6033 days ago | link | parent

I posted this over on hacker news - but it should be here too:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191501

If arc could seamlessly access PLT scheme's libraries that would be a good start. I know from first hand experience that there are a number of ways to access PLT scheme from arkani and arc. But, there are two big issues. First there are type differences between fundamental types (lists gah). This means there can be a lot of work to convert between PLT scheme and arc, not impossible but time consuming. Secondly, there is no nice way to pull in a PLT library and just use it in arc. Of course this could be implemented - it's just not there yet.

There are two choices I see going forward immediately. Arc and the arc community starts implementing their own libraries or we find a way to use PLT scheme's libraries (ok maybe sbcl if you are using arkani).



1 point by jmatt 6033 days ago | link

there is some discussion on accessing PLT scheme's libs over here: http://www.arclanguage.com/item?id=6757

I know there is additional information somewhere in the forum on type differences when coercing data between scheme and arc - specifically '() nil (list) aren't equivalent. Worse come to worse - see the source.

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4 points by almkglor 6033 days ago | link

There are a bunch of functions on scheme-side ac which help in conversions.

For functions returning booleans, there's 'tnil:

  (xdef 'exact (lambda (x) 
                 (tnil (and (integer? x) (exact? x)))))
For functions whose return value isn't used, you can use 'wrapnil:

  (xdef 'system (wrapnil system))
'ac-denil converts plain nil to 'nil, and nil at cdr positions into '().

  (define (expand-ssyntax sym)
    (ac-denil ((eval '__ssexpand) sym)))

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2 points by absz 6033 days ago | link

Nitpick: Anarki is the git repo, Arkani is the wiki written in Arc.

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2 points by jmatt 6033 days ago | link

Yeah thanks for pointing that out. My bad. Those damn names are so similar and I have my gits all scripted.

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4 points by eds 6033 days ago | link

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=5259

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