Well, thanks for the thoughtful response, your suggestions are very sensible. I also think it would be nice to have a Chicken-specific introduction to functional programming, and I would support any effort in the Chicken community to put together such a document. If anybody is interested, I would really like to take parts of SICP and _Standard ML for the Working Programmer_ -- both books do a very good job at highlighting the idioms of functional programming -- I think a good tutorial can be constructed by recycling the structure of existing textbooks, while of course modifying it to fit the specifics of Chicken.
I disagree that new users should know how to put together a R5RS environment with Chicken. As a new user of Chicken, my concern was not with standards-conforming code; my concern was how to get code to work using the functional programming idioms I had learned from Standard ML. That's why the concept of core eggs doesn't make sense to me -- "core eggs" already implies some assumptions about programming style that may or may not be necessary. If I don't give a [EMAIL PROTECTED] about rational numbers, why do I need the numbers egg? On the other hand, if I want to write code that involves arbitrary precision arithmetic, I will figure out that I need the numbers egg pretty quickly, and I don't need any "core eggs" to tell me that. And so on. Basically, the concept of core eggs is highly redundant and unnecessarily restrictive. Better focus on general concepts such as recursion and dynamic data structures -- things applicable to all functional programming languages, not just one implementation of one language. From there you can decide which eggs are important for the kind of programming you want to do, so you have your own personal set of core eggs. As for your note about visual appeal -- I agree 110%. I find the wiki documentation ugly, ugly, ugly. And the Texinfo and eggdoc documentation is pretty, pretty, pretty :-) We need to continue including a Texinfo manual with Chicken, because Texinfo can generate beautiful printed documents (as of course it uses TeX as the underlying layout engine). And we need better stylesheets for the wiki. I also like the idea about creating addenda to the documentation. This way, we can require that there is always a "core" documentation page in the egg SVN repository, but users can add to it on the wiki, and perhaps periodically the core document will be updated with new information from the wiki. Would you be interested in developing a more detailed proposal about that? -Ivan Vincent Manis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I was offline for almost all of the documentation discussion, so > please pardon my beating a somewhat dead horse. I'd like to make the > following points, which (mostly) haven't been raised. > _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users
