SRFI 203: Drawing Language for SICP

Maurits Escher’s Work in Wood by M. Escher

This blog hasn’t had enough attention for quite a while. This is not, however, because I have abandoned it, but rather because the original purpose of this blog, that is dumping essays regarding books I read, is still valid. It’s just that the most recent book has taken an order of magnitude more time than I had expected it to take.

Okay, I’m going to write a bigger and better review on the “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”, but the book altogether took so much time, effort and emotions, that even writing the review is going to take a while.

Meanwhile, one of the by-products of my reading happened to be a proposal of a feature to be included into the Scheme Language, that is needed in order to support all the code examples in the book.

(Yes-yes, you’re not misreading it. The book published in 1996 is still not covered by the existing language standard in full. Otoh, it means that there is a chance of achieving things.)

Now that the proposal has an official number, there is going to be a public discussion among the potential Language System providers, and maybe (if it passes the review), we will have this feature officially recognised.

Watching discussions of experts on what they may actually work themselves is a fascinating experience, and a chance to improve own skills too. In this case, the discussion is not expected to be too heated, however, but anyway.

https://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-203/ — this is the link to my recent proposal.

It speaks about quite an interesting approach to generating computer images, that builds on top of the classical features present in most drawing languages, such as PostScript, TikZ, MetaPost or SVG. While the expressive power is largely the same, the degree of abstractness is greater, which leaves gives greater code reusability and flexibility.

Scheme is by not means the only language that has a community feature review process.

Python has Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP) Java has Java Community Process (JCP) Scheme has Scheme Requests For Implementation

The image in the header is a digital copy of a work of M. Escher, whose works have inspired the original author of the “Picture Language” Peter Henderson. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.137.1503

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