squish

["Paul Steckler" <steck@ccs.neu.edu>]

A couple of days ago, I sent a message asking about interest
in a partial port of scsh to PLT Scheme.  There have been 
responses to my query by a little over a dozen people.  Let me 
summarize those responses, and suggest a course of action.

The questions were:

 - do you currently use scsh?

   Five respondents said yes, one respondent uses scsh scripts
   written by others. 

 - would you find scsh-under-PLT-Scheme useful?

   Nearly everyone said yes.  Of course, this is expected -- 
   everyone wants more software to choose from!

 - would you use a PLT scsh-oid that implemented some, but
   not all of scsh?

   About three said "yes", one said "depends".  A number of 
   people really use the low-level Unix features of scsh, so
   it appears they'd have reservations about a scsh-oid without
   them.

The remaining questions asked what scsh features were and were 
not used.  It appears that just about all the scsh features are 
used by someone.

In general, there appears to be enthusiasm about a port of some
kind.  So let's go for it.

I think we can divide the scsh features into those that
are implementable atop PLT Scheme, and those that will require
C bits.  The Scheme bits should be portable across the platforms
supported by PLT Scheme, which is not true of scsh.

I suggest that we start with the Schemeable parts, and add the 
low-level Unix stuff as needed.  It appears that Matthew Flatt
is adding some of the desired low-level stuff directly in MzScheme 
already, so maybe there won't be too much to add by the time we get 
there.  The Unix bits should be made separately loadable from the Scheme
bits. 

Francisco Solsona offered some volunteers to help with the project.
Great, because I'm getting old and tired.  I'm happy to write as 
much as I can, and help coordinate the volunteer efforts into 
a coherent package.

Let there be `squish'!

-- Paul