Scheme Boston

Scheme Boston is a group of Scheme users who are located in and around Boston, Massachusetts. The group meets monthly, more or less, and usually on the third Wednesday of the month.

The next Scheme Boston meeting will be on Wednesday, 20 October 2004, at 7:30 PM in West Village H (WVH) 366 at Northeastern.

A New Foreign Function Interface for PLT Scheme
Eli Barzilay
Northeastern University
Even a programmer devoted to Scheme may prefer using foreign libraries in certain situation. Connecting the two worlds involves glue code, usually using C, which requires significant programming efforts and system expertise. In this paper we describe a PLT Scheme extension for interacting with foreign code, designed around a simple philosophy: stay in the fun world, even if it is no longer a safe sand box. Our system relieves the programmer from low-level technicalities while keeping the benefits of Scheme as a better programming environment compared to C.

Directions to WVH:

440 Huntington Ave at Parker Rd, right across from the Museum of Fine Arts.
On Northeastern's campus map), it's in the area marked "Under Construction" between buildings 22 and 36.
Just about halfway between the Northeastern and MFA stops on the green line, and an easy walk from Ruggles on the orange line. Also convenient to bus #39.
There may be parking available on Parker Road next to the building, or not.
Alternative parking: if you are coming on Huntington Ave (Route 9) from the west, the Museum of Fine Arts is on your left. Turn left when you see it (that is, before you pass it). This is a short street connecting to the Fens. On the left is a parking garage; on the right are two parking lots for the MFA and its school. If you turn right along the Fen, there is street parking as well.

Scheme Boston has two mailing lists:

scheme-boston-announce@treese.org for announcements about the group and its meetings.

scheme-boston@treese.org for discussion about writing better programs with Scheme, as well as for discussion about the Scheme Boston group. All announcements are sent to this list as well, so you don't need to join both.

To join one of the mailing lists, send mail to
scheme-boston-announce-request@treese.org
or
scheme-boston-request@treese.org
with the word "subscribe" in the body.

Notes and Presentations from Previous Meetings

September, 2004: Mike Sperber, "Why (car '()) Is Not An Exception, or: This Exception System Is Not That Exception System" Slides in PDF. (Note: these slides have several minor updates from those Mike actually used.)

March, 2004: Taylor Campbell, "Proposal for a Scheme Filesystem Interface"

October, 2003: Win Treese, "Writing Secure Applications in Scheme". Slides in PDF. (Note: these slides are from an updated presentation at the 2003 International Lisp Conference.)

April, 2003:Paul Steckler and Tudor Antoniu, "Using MysterX and XeLda"

March, 2003: Dorai Sitaram, "Writing Portable Scheme Programs" [ slides]

February, 2003: Mike Machenry, "The Test Suite Tool in DrScheme"

January, 2003: Ryan Culpepper, "Implementing a Simple Picture Gallery with Scheme and PostgresSQL." [spgsql home page]
[ spgsql demo]

December, 2002: Ken Williams, "Using Scheme to Solve the Little Blue Cube Problem" [slides (text)] [code]. An alternative version of a program to solve the problem was provided by Peter Olson, who says:

Here's my solution to the puzzle, which I'd like you to add to the Web site at your convenience. It is a deterministic algorithm. It's interesting to note that it isn't much faster or slower than Ken's version (maybe because amb is really deterministic too and the search is being pruned in much the same way)

November, 2002: Neel Krishnaswami, "A Hacker's Guide to Hygienic Macros." [slides]

October, 2002: Paul Graunke on the PLT Scheme Web Server and Paul Steckler on the new PLT Scheme Help Desk.

September, 2002: Bruce Lewis on BRL [slides]

Meeting Location and Directions

Egan Hall

alternative directions