Category: Programming

Scheme in the Real-time CG Content Production

If you try to pin down Schemers to a particular stereotype, you will fail; they are just too diverse a bunch.

Take Shiro Kawai’s website. He’s got some great resources on that page. Dig in deeper and have a look at his paper Gluing Things Together – Scheme in the Real-time CG Content Production.

The short story is that

Square USA R&D Team had been developing an in-house real-time rendering engine in a project called Dancer, and we adopted Scheme as an embedded scripting language.

Here is how they used it:

  1. As a File Format
  2. As a Debugging tool
  3. For Rapid Prototyping
  4. For Authoring

There are a lot, and I mean a lot of really interesting bits about how the tackled the problems they were facing.

The best part: you don’t have to be a computer graphics buff to have a heck of a good time reading this paper. Enjoy!

Naughty Dogs use Scheme in Video Games

Once again Naughty Dog Software has used Lisp to write their video games.

Here are the two blurbs where I heard about it:

I had held off posting this for a while in hopes that presentations materials would show up. They haven’t set; so I’m going to have to do some digging!

Ur-Scheme: Compiling a Subset of R5RS Scheme to Asm

The home page for Ur-Scheme tells the tale of one mans journey implementing a compiler from a subset of Scheme to Assembly on Linux.

For folks interested in almost totally pure functional programs, here is a teaser:

It contains relatively little mutation. Although almost every line of the compiler has “side effects” like outputting lines of assembly code, there are fairly few locations where the compiler’s internal state is mutated. I count 25 calls to set! and string-set! in the 1600 lines of code, including the standard library.

Encript-ing Scheme

Enscript is such a versatile and helpful tool.

Here is how I use it to pretty print Scheme code: 


enscript --landscape --columns=2 --highlight=scheme --borders --line-numbers --output=.ps .ss

Addendum: 03/06/09

Here is the direct link for the GnuWin32 download of Enscript.

Addendum: 03/08/09

Here are my new favorite settings for rendering code with this excellent program: 


enscript --word-wrap --underlay=Underlay --ul-gray=0.9 --line-numbers --
landscape --highlight=scheme --columns=2 --borders --output=test.ps C:\collects\wisdomandwonder\resume\latex-renderer.sls