long term plans?

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <shriram@cs.rice.edu>]

Hi Jon,

Three (well, 7/2) comments.

1. I think you will find the PLT collection becoming more and more
ubiquitous over time.  After all, in their early days, Perl and Tcl
and Python and the rest weren't ubiquitous either.  One thing that
might help is if we could get our stuff on the default Red Hat (and
other Linux distribution) disks, which currently contain outdated
Scheme systems.

2. We have a mechanism called .plt files that you may find rather
useful.  .plt is a plaform-independent, self-installing method for
distributing extensions to PLT Scheme.  Therefore, you could give a
user the following directions:

  a. Download and install PLT Scheme
     (as others have pointed out, this is pretty trivial)

  b. Download link.plt

  c. Drag-and-drop on the PLT Scheme installer

Alternatively, you could replace (b) and (c) with

  b. Open http://.../link.plt with File | Open URL in DrScheme/Help Desk

and that's it!

3. Several teachers have had no objection to downloading the PLT
Scheme distribution.  As Matthias points out, this is about as simple
as it gets -- even on Unix, it involves minimal manual intervention
(and it's available in RPM formats).

3.5. (and you can ignore this --) With the advent of C#, I have to
wonder about the continued ubiquity of JVMs.

Shriram