SISC

SISC
Developer(s)	Scott G. Miller, Matthias Radestock
Stable release	1.16.6 / February 27, 2007
Operating system	Cross-platform via JVM
Type	Programming language
License	Dual license:; GPL and MPL
Website	sisc-scheme.org

Last updated February 19, 2019

SISC is an R5RS Scheme implementation, which includes a full number tower, hygienic macros, proper tail recursion, and first class continuations. SISC is short for Second Interpreter of Scheme Code, in reference to its predecessor LISC, the Lightweight Interpreter of Scheme Code.^[1]

Hygienic macros are macros whose expansion is guaranteed not to cause the accidental capture of identifiers. They are a feature of programming languages such as Scheme, Dylan and Rust. The general problem of accidental capture was well known within the Lisp community prior to the introduction of hygienic macros. Macro writers would use language features that would generate unique identifiers or use obfuscated identifiers in order to avoid the problem. Hygienic macros are a programmatic solution to the capture problem that is integrated into the macro expander itself. The term "hygiene" was coined in Kohlbecker et al.'s 1986 paper that introduced hygienic macro expansion, inspired by the terminology used in mathematics.

In computer science and computer programming, a continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a computer program. A continuation reifies the program control state, i.e. the continuation is a data structure that represents the computational process at a given point in the process's execution; the created data structure can be accessed by the programming language, instead of being hidden in the runtime environment. Continuations are useful for encoding other control mechanisms in programming languages such as exceptions, generators, coroutines, and so on.

SISC is free software, dual-licensed under the Mozilla Public License and the GNU General Public License, Version 2. It was developed by Scott G. Miller and Matthias Radestock.

Free software software licensed to preserve user freedoms

Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price: users—individually or in cooperation with computer programmers—are free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed free insofar as they give users ultimate control over the first, thereby allowing them to control what their devices are programmed to do.

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open source software license developed and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. It is a weak copyleft license, characterized as a middle ground between permissive free software licenses and the GNU General Public License (GPL), that seeks to balance the concerns of proprietary and open source developers.

Features

SISC depends on Sun Microsystems' Java programming language platform. This runtime environment allows SISC to provide many extensions and libraries such as networking, exception handling, a module system, and a Java foreign function interface.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

Java is a general-purpose computer-programming language that is concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, and specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers "write once, run anywhere" (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture. As of 2016, Java is one of the most popular programming languages in use, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers. Java was originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its original features from SmallTalk, with a syntax similar to C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them.

In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subroutines, classes, values or type specifications. In IBM's OS/360 and its successors they are referred to as partitioned data sets.

The SISC website claims that it performs faster than any other Scheme interpreter based on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Like GNU Guile, this Scheme is suitable for embedding into larger programs, where Guile is designed for inclusion in C programs, SISC is designed for the JVM.

GNU Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensions is the preferred extension language system for the GNU Project, which features an implementation of the programming language Scheme. Its first version was released in 1993. In addition to large parts of Scheme standards, Guile Scheme includes modularized extensions for many different programming tasks.

C is a general-purpose, imperative computer programming language, supporting structured programming, lexical variable scope and recursion, while a static type system prevents many unintended operations. By design, C provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it has found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, including operating systems, as well as various application software for computers ranging from supercomputers to embedded systems.

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References

↑ Scott G. Miller; Matthias Radestock. "Introduction". SISC for Seasoned Schemers. Retrieved 2007-09-25. SISC as a project began as the successor to the Lightweight Interpreter of Scheme Code (LISC). LISC was a small, stack-based almost R4RS compliant Scheme. SISC was born out of the desire to create an interpreter that was of a similar footprint to LISC, but which executed Scheme code much faster, complied fully to the R5RS standard, and which wasn't limited by the stack-based model. SISC met these goals very quickly, and has since progressed in active development to be a competitive Scheme system. As a successor to LISC the interpreter was named the Second Interpreter of Scheme Code.

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[1] Scott G. Miller; Matthias Radestock. "Introduction". SISC for Seasoned Schemers. Retrieved 2007-09-25. SISC as a project began as the successor to the Lightweight Interpreter of Scheme Code (LISC). LISC was a small, stack-based almost R4RS compliant Scheme. SISC was born out of the desire to create an interpreter that was of a similar footprint to LISC, but which executed Scheme code much faster, complied fully to the R5RS standard, and which wasn't limited by the stack-based model. SISC met these goals very quickly, and has since progressed in active development to be a competitive Scheme system. As a successor to LISC the interpreter was named the Second Interpreter of Scheme Code.