On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Kelly Murray wrote:
...
> How many people are using STk ??
> The mailing list sure is quiet.
...
The mailing list does have its quiet periods, but occasionally there's a
flurry of messages. Probably the extended quiet is because people are so
happy with STk.
I have no idea how many users there are, but I remember that some time ago
Erick asked people to let him know if they were using it, and for what, so
he could drum up more funds for support, etc. I'm sorry I didn't reply to
this earlier, but here goes, belatedly:
I use STk for an artificial intelligence project involving an agent
(simulated robot) with the task of building and maintaining a wall in an
environment (called "Brickworld") where there are hostile agents and
random processes that tend to destroy the wall. Further information
is available at
http://php.indiana.edu/~gdweber/bw-project/index.html
I use Scheme for the project because it is an elegant and powerful
language. I use STk in particular because it has a sophisticated object
system (STklos) and interface to Tk which enables me to "see" what's going
on in the simulated world.
My only complaint (hitherto unvoiced) is that STk is not as fast as some
other Scheme systems. But even here there is a saving grace, because the
socket facility makes it easy to interact with another process. I
typically run two Scheme processes for this project: STk handles the
environment, while compute-intensive agents run in Petite Chez Scheme.
That's the free, interpreted version of Chez Scheme.
I found this arrangement gave me a 5x speedup.
Many thanks, Erick, for making STk available!
Gregory D. Weber
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Indiana University East
2325 Chester Boulevard, Richmond, Indiana 47374-1289, U.S.A.
Telephone: (765) 973-8420
FAX: (765) 973-8220
WWW:
http://php.indiana.edu/~gdweber/
Received on Fri Nov 24 2000 - 17:55:41 CET