Tag: Dylan

The Dylan Resource Guide

I started learning more about Dylan by reading the material listed in the Dylan Resource Guide in comp.lang.dylan. It is true what they say; Dylan and Scheme seem to be very similar. When you take into account what Dylan purports to offer, it sounds very interesting!
Here are some links from the resource guide:

  • #dylan on Freenode. Channel logs are supposed to be available here; but were not as of this posting.
  • comp.lang.dylan
  • The Dylan Language Reference Manual: The “DRM” defines the Dylan language and standard library.
  • Dylan Programming: Dylan Programming is a book that teaches how to program in Dylan.
  • Gwydion Dylan: Gwydion Dylan is an open source command-line compiler originally developed by Carnegie Melon University as part of their Gwydion project. It is available on several platforms.
  • Open Dylan: Open Dylan is an open source IDE originally developed by Harlequin and, later, Functional Objects. The IDE is available for Windows, and the compiler is available as a command-line program for other platforms.

The Dylan programming language

When reading about Scheme or Smalltalk, the Dylan programming language is often mentioned.
Here is one person who likes it that has provided some notes on how to translate Scheme to Dylan. Here is his take on it:

Dylan is a completely object-oriented language, with multiple inheritance, generic functions, a powerful module system, a very expressive exception-handling system, hygienic macros, pleasant semantics, and a clean way to turn the knob between expensive dynamic behavior and efficient static constraints.

It sounds very interesting.