ZHONG GUO REN

Shelley Young: you know
Shelley Young: your blog makes you look like a commie

Just so you know, I’m not a commie.

Now that I’m blogging again, I ought to write down what I have been doing for the past few months.

When I got back to the US last spring, I went to talk to Olin Shivers about my idea of implementing R5RS on top of Alan and Ian’s COLA runtime. While I think that is still a good idea, it didn’t pan out then and I moved on to work on something else.

Instead I have been working with Olin to restart the Scheme Underground effort that has (pretty much) been abandoned since the early 90s. Our initial plan was to work on a nice interactive shell that’s based on Olin’s work on scsh, however that idea was abandoned after realizing that the Tüebingen crew already did something similar with Commander S. However, with its customizable viewers, Commander S is actually quite a bit more than just a normal interactive shell, so I still think it’s interesting to implement our original (simpler) concept.

To get up to speed on Scheme, I learned about Termcap and Terminfo and ported Paul Foley’s terminfo.lisp to Scheme. I also took another Common Lisp project, Linedit, as inspiration and wrote my own Scheme version from scratch.

Lately, I have been working on porting MIT Scheme’s Edwin editor to Scheme48. I hope to get a terminal-based text-only version done before the beginning of the summer. Wish me luck.

With a domain name like a-chinaman.com, I can’t help but make my site a bit more Red. To that end, I have added a custom favicon, as well as tweaked the theme’s color scheme to better reflect my Red sentiments.

I took Srinig’s Fluid Blue theme and sinified it by changing it to use the reddish colors from the Tango Project’s color palette. I’m called my derived theme Fluid Red, it’s available in my Git repository.

Didn’t feel like working this afternoon, so instead, I updated my blog software to WordPress 2.5.

Here’s some Scheme code for all of you fans out there:

(define-record-type keystroke
  (%make-keystroke %value %meta?)
  keystroke?
  (%value char-value)
  (%meta? meta?))

(define-record-discloser keystroke
  (lambda (k)
    `(Keystroke ,(keystroke->sexpr k) ,(keystroke-hash k) )))

(define (parse-key form)
  (if (list? form)
      (let ((tag (car  form))
            (val (cadr form)))
        (case tag
          ((control) (%control  (parse-key val)))
          ((meta)    (%meta     (parse-key val)))
          ((key)     (%key     val))
          (else      (error “This is not a valid key form “ tag))))
      (%key form)))