Drinkable Chicken

http://www.archimedes-lab.org/colorblindnesstest.html

For fun and profit, a color blindness test… I only got Test A correct, and half of test H. :-( *blush* The rest is mostly a blurry mess where I can occasionally make out half a number of something.

Also see: http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness

It’s interesting… on my MacBook, the images in the aforementioned blog post look almost the same to me… but on my netbook, which has tweaked color settings, they don’t look the same at all. (The effect is limited though… I still cannot pass the Ishihara test. :-)

In other news, there is a new documentation server for Chicken Scheme online. It’s called Chickadee and it looks pretty damn useful. You can look up built-in functions, SRFIs and eggs. I’m currently working on a little project that uses Chicken, so I guess I’ll be using this a lot. ^_^

IMHO, Chicken and Gauche are the two most desirable Scheme implementations at the moment. They both have a pragmatic approach that isn’t always present in other implementations. (Although I haven’t tried every single one of them…)

I just discovered Gauche Scheme. I have been looking for a Lisp/Scheme dialect for my latest pet project, and it seems this is just what the doctor ordered.

• It’s cross-platform (Unixoid systems and Windows)
• Builds out of the box on Mac OS X, even on my old G3
• Supports both hygienic and “dirty” macros
• Comes with an object system
• Comes with a bunch of libraries out of the box (like a HTTP library, which is one of the things I needed)
• Works with SLIB; in fact, if SLIB is already installed, it will find it and integrate it
• Supports a large number of SRFIs

Chicken has most of this too, except it lacks Windows binaries, and it recently got rid of unhygienic macros. Libraries can be installed as eggs, of course, so it might not need SLIB.

Anyway, said “pet project” involves making HTTP GET calls, and requires a powerful object system. (More about this later, if it ever becomes usable.) I wanted to use a Lisp/Scheme dialect for flexibility, and I wanted it to be cross-platform if at all possible, so users can run it on Windows as well. It turned out that it was remarkably hard to find a Scheme that matched all these requirements. I will not go into all the problems that I encountered, but suffice to say that Gambit, Scheme48, PLT and Petite Chez Scheme all had their own issues. (That is not to say that I won’t use them for other projects…)

That said, I might still change my mind and use Common Lisp instead… :-)