Re: Info needed on scheme research

[otter!ange@hplabs.hp.com (Andy Norman)]

ange@otter.HP.COM (Andy Norman) writes:
>If anyone knows what work is being / has been done with _Scheme_ in the
>following areas, could they please _MAIL_ me, and I will summarise to the
>net.

>Modules.
>Formal definitions of both data types and language semantics.
>Type checking.
>Frames, OOPS, Active Values and Daemons.


Here is a summary of the replies that I have received:

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From: Will Clinger <willc%tekchips.CRL%tektronix.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET>

Mitch Wand has done a lot of work with denotational semantics expressed
in Scheme.  I've done a little -- I wrote the semantics of Scheme itself
in Scheme in order to test it.  I think Mitch is now working with formal
semantics of data types, objects, and inheritance.  ML would undoubtedly
be a better language for this sort of thing than Scheme, but Scheme is
more widely available and the implementations are often better.

Mitch built an ML-style type checker for use with Scheme 311.  It was
buggy and crude but useful because Scheme 311 had no debugger.  David
Gifford and his students are currently working on FX, which is a statically
typed language with type inference that can be thought of as a dialect of
Scheme.

TI built an object-oriented system called SCOOPS for their PC Scheme that
was used in their Personal Consultant series of expert system shells.
They made the source code available, and there is at least one independent
implementation of SCOOPS for MacScheme.  The T object system came earlier,
though, and is a more elegant system.  Norman Adams of Tektronix has
recently been working on a system similar to the T object system.

There's someone at Carnegie Mellon who's applying flow analysis to the
type inference problem for Scheme.

That's about it for my knowledge, but I'm sure lots of other stuff has
been done.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: willc%tekchips.CRL%tektronix.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET

Uwe Pleban's MESS system for building compilers from denotational
specifications uses Scheme as well as Turbo Prolog (for the code
generator) and an ML-like language (for the semantics; the ML-like
language is implemented in Scheme).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many thanks to Will for taking the time to reply.

					ange

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