XScheme and the whereabouts of David Betz

[hanche@imf.unit.no]

A number of people have been asking a number of questions about David
Betz and XScheme lately.  I will try to answer a few of them.

As far as I know, the only reliable way to contact David Betz is on
Bix, the BYTE Information eXchange.  He hosts his own XLISP conference
there, with a separate XScheme topic in it.  This is also where you can
always expet to find the latest releases of XLisp and XScheme.  I don't
think he reads this list/newsgroup or any other service avaiable in the
academic community.

Bix is a commercial service, and so not the place where you see most of
us academic types :-) However, is not outrageously expensive if you can
avoid telecommunications charges from Europe (as I have to put up with)
and refrain from joining too many conferences.  Look in any recent
issue of BYTE to find information on pricing and how to join.

Apparently, David has spent more time on XLisp than on XScheme lately,
with XLisp 2.1 just recently released.  We can only hope that he will
now turn his attention back to XScheme.  As far as I know, XScheme 0.16
(10 Jan 1989) is still the current release, though 0.17 may be close.
I sure hope so, since the object oriented features in 0.16 are broken
(this happened after he added first class environments to the
language).  And I have asked him (politely I hope) to release 0.17
soon...

Why did he not document the object oriented features of XScheme?  Well,
I think it is because he has been more interested in just getting a
working Scheme up and going than in adding support for objects yet.
You should bear in mind that as long as the version number stays below
1.0 the author probably does not consider his program as finished or
really ready for general consumption.  At least, here is what he said
about it last year:

    ==========
    xlisp/xscheme #82, from dbetz, 136 chars, Sat Nov 19 11:32:25 1988
    Comment to 81. 
    ----------
    I'm not going to increase the version number to 1.0 until I add some
    decent debugging support.  I'd also like to add a built-in editor.

- Harald Hanche-Olsen     Division of Mathematical Sciences
  hanche@imf.unit.no      The Norwegian Institute of Technology
  hanche@norunit.bitnet   N-7034 Trondheim-NTH NORWAY