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From: gjr@hplgr2.hpl.hp.com (Guillermo (Bill) J. Rozas)
Subject: Re: Is the Java VM language-independent or not?  Scheme support
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In-Reply-To: tmb@best.com's message of 14 Dec 1995 02:23:13 -0800
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 21:46:36 GMT
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In article <pb8u4347xm6.fsf@tmb.vip.best.com> tmb@best.com () writes:

|   Reply-To: tmb@best.com
|   NNTP-Posting-Host: tmb.vip.best.com
|   In-reply-to: dimock@das.harvard.edu's message of 7 Dec 1995 17:04:23 GMT
|   X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.0.4
|
|   In article <4a76qn$soe@necco.harvard.edu> dimock@das.harvard.edu (Allyn Dimock) writes:
|   | In a talk at MIT on Dec 6, Guy Steele said that he had a mandate from the
|   | other Java developers to make sure that the Java VM would support Scheme.
|   | 
|   | I'm not sure of Steele's exact phrasing, and I may have missed any details
|   | presented during the Q&A period after the official talk.
|
|   I hope this doesn't mean support for call/cc.  Supporting call/cc is
|   nontrivial, and while there is some argument to be made that you want
|   it in a system used for teaching CS and AI/CS research, the tradeoffs
|   for supporting it are just poor for a system like Java.  I also hope
|   it doesn't mean Scheme's floating point stuff, which not even MIT
|   bothers to implement.

Hah?  In the context ot a simple VM like Java's, supporting cwcc is
straight-forward.  Even with compilation it is not hard.
The hard issues have to do with inter-operability with C, since C code
is typically not reentrant in this fashion.

With respect to floating point, what do you mean that MIT does not
implement it?  There is really no floating-point in the Scheme
standard/reports.  Floating-point is an implementation technique for
numbers that the standard works well with.  As far as I know MIT's
implementation is fully compliant with the standard and uses
floating-point to represent some classes of numbers.  MIT's is not the
only implementation with this property.

|   Beyond that, there really is nothing that the Java VM needs to support
|   Scheme reasonably well.

Tail recursion?
