I stumbled across Gauche Scheme recently. It looks like a nice implementation that doesn't get stuck on holy crusades. It's bytecode interpreted, much like Perl, Python, Ruby and recent versions of PHP. It started out with the core language (as amended by SFRIs), and it's driven by practical concerns, not curriculum requirements. And it doesn't pretend that the universe is a Scheme VM; it has hooks into POSIX APIs that a lot of Schemes pretend is unimportant.
One of the pillars of the Scheme community (Dorai Sitaram) asked for a feature recently:
I see that code in a file being loaded can use a number of parameter-like thunks to access various information. Would it also be possible to add a means for the file's code to access its (the file's) pathname or containing directory -- either absolute, or, more simply, relative to the Gauche session's current directory?That feature is indeed useful. And Perl stores something like that in %INC. Funny how all of the little features a language environment needs are mostly baked into Perl or CPAN already. :-)
