chicken scheme

(10:55:00) The topic for #chicken is: Latest release: 4.6.0 || Chicken: A practical and portable Scheme system || Official website: http://www.call-cc.org || Community wiki: http://wiki.call-cc.org
(11:01:06) rien left the room (quit: Ping timeout: 255 seconds).
(11:01:29) rien [~unkanon@dyn-160-39-34-114.dyn.columbia.edu] entered the room.
(11:05:32) azathoth99: hello
(11:05:51) C-Keen: re
(11:05:54) C-Keen: hello azathoth99
(11:06:04) mario-goulart: Hi azathoth99
(11:09:11) azathoth99: so I am trying to grow past bash which has served me very well, but the book modern perl left me with a head ache
(11:09:31) azathoth99: and here I find chicken and scheme and some good online books
(11:09:42) C-Keen: enjoy
(11:10:20) azathoth99: is it foolish to use chicken for perlish things such as system unix automation or is it well able? I do see mention of pattern matching aka ergex which is an area I wish to becoem proficient in
(11:10:32) azathoth99: regex that is
(11:10:51) azathoth99: netbsd even lets me install chicken 4.6 in binary nice
(11:10:55) azathoth99: :)
(11:13:54) mario-goulart: azathoth99: I do that quite frequently. Whennever my shell scripts grow more than 30 lines I replace it by a scheme script (or compiled program)
(11:15:33) azathoth99: http://www.scheme.com/tspl4/intro.html#./intro:h0 I see chicken is R5, so does this book apply or is it for R6?
(11:15:42) azathoth99: would SICP be best intro?
(11:16:57) mario-goulart: azathoth99: I think they are quite different books. SICP is more for "general programming", but it happens to use scheme as programming language. TSPG is about scheme.
(11:17:41) mario-goulart: TSPL* :-)
(11:18:44) azathoth99: so for a beginner, what would be a good book?
(11:18:57) azathoth99: http://wiki.call-cc.org/man/4/Getting%20started I am here
(11:19:05) rien_: a beginner at scheme or at programming in general?
(11:19:25) azathoth99: both
(11:19:27) azathoth99: :(
(11:19:36) azathoth99: I am a lowly unix admin
(11:19:40) mario-goulart: Well, SICP and TSPL are good ones.
(11:19:43) azathoth99: no compsci degree either
(11:20:07) rien_: compsci degrees are overrated *ducks*
(11:20:28) mario-goulart: azathoth99: if you intend to use chicken, the Getting Started section from the manual is a very good start too.
(11:20:32) rien_: azathoth99: what mario said, just use both books
(11:20:50) mario-goulart: azathoth99: and ask here anything related to chicken. :-)
(11:21:21) mario-goulart: azathoth99: see also http://chickadee.call-cc.org It's very handy to find chicken things.
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(11:23:08) rien_: so you aren't proficient with regexps?
(11:28:34) azathoth99: no
(11:28:49) azathoth99: or if I had to i used a web page regex builder
(11:28:59) azathoth99: I am great at making end runs around hard problems
(11:29:28) azathoth99: aka cheating
(11:29:35) mario-goulart: :-)
(11:31:49) rien_: azathoth99: you'll make a great programmer then :)
(11:32:23) rien_: regular expressions are easy but I'd recommend you learn Perl's regexps, which are called PCRE (the engine is called that)
(11:32:40) rien_: don't bother learning POSIX, nobody cares about that and it'll damage your brain :P
(11:32:56) azathoth99: perl hurt my head
(11:33:13) azathoth99: @ for array but $ to get out of array
(11:33:13) rien_: mine too, but its regexps are the best bar none
(11:33:20) azathoth99: ok cool
(11:36:46) DerGuteMoritz: azathoth99: welcome aboard!
(11:37:11) DerGuteMoritz: azathoth99: chicken also has SREs (Scheme Regular Expressions) in the form of an implementation called IrRegex, see http://synthcode.com/scheme/irregex/
(11:37:33) DerGuteMoritz: their syntax is much easier on the eyes since it's based on s-expressions
(11:37:50) rien_: yes that's cool too, it's better for regexps you can actually maintain
(11:37:59) rien_: instead of perl's throwaway write-only regexes :)
(11:38:01) azathoth99: im all over that
(11:38:13) DerGuteMoritz: :-)
(11:38:30) DerGuteMoritz: also, if you intend to write shell script replacements a lot, the matchable egg might be worth a look
(11:38:43) DerGuteMoritz: see http://3e8.org/chickadee/matchable/
(11:38:54) DerGuteMoritz: and posix of course: http://3e8.org/chickadee/posix