Hi, Danny-- Interesting question. I don't know that I have the expertise to give you a whole lot of advice, but this is something I have been interested in, and I also come from a Python background.
My short answer is that I don't feel that Chicken Scheme is a great tool for this kind of thing, though it is not terrible either. One of Python's strong suits in my experience is that it makes simple things simple. Scheme, well, some things are very simple, like: (with-output-to-file "hello.txt" (lambda () (print "Hello there!"))) I/O doesn't get much simpler (or safer) than that. On the other hand, certain common tasks, like processing dates and times, can be a big headache. But anyway, I think much of the functionality you need is included in the Chicken distribution, especially the posix, files, srfi-13 (for string processing), and irregex modules. Regarding srfi-13, you should be aware that it not internationalized, so you might want to install the utf8 egg and use the included utf8-srfi-13 modules, which has (with minor exceptions, I think) the same API. And if you use irregex, I would recommend trying the SRE syntax--regular expressions represented as S-expressions. It takes some getting used to, but I think once you are familiar with it, it is much more readable than PCRE-style string patterns. Some additional eggs that might be useful include: posix-extras directory-utils log5scm ... and a command-line parser. I've tried args, easy-args, and getopt-long, and have not found any of them very pleasant or intuitive--this is one area where I'd say Python has a definite edge. However, there's a relatively new one called imperative-command-line-a, which I didn't know about until just now. It seems to have good documentation. I'd be interested to know why you are frustrated with Python. Also, you might get better feedback if you could describe the kinds of tasks you want to do. As you may have noticed, Chicken has a sizable collection of extension libraries--not nearly as many as Python, but enough that noone can be familiar with all of them. HTH. -- Matt Gushee _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users