My little statistics library, chez-stats, is now available for installation through Raven, a package manager for Chez Scheme. Raven aims to provide an easy-to-use tool for local package management.
Raven’s installation instructions are straightforward. However, on macOS Catalina, I had to use sudo when making a copy of the Chez Scheme compiler, i.e., sudo cp chez scheme.
When starting a new project, raven init will prompt you to provide the content to populate a package.
I have added functionality for reading and writing CVS files to my Chez Scheme library, chez-stats. In a previous post, I compared reading CSV files in R and Racket and made the following observation.
By and large, R users are not programmers but end users who want to expeditiously perform tasks related to cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing their data. There is a large, and growing, industry around building R packages and tools that facilitate those end users.
Recently, I switched from learning Racket to Chez Scheme. I wanted to try to repeat some of my previous Racket exercises in Chez Scheme, but quickly ran into a barrier when my first choice required drawing random variates from a normal distribution. I looked for existing Chez Scheme libraries but came up empty. I considered SRFI 27: Sources of Random Bits, which includes example code for generating random numbers from a normal distribution, and reached out for guidance.
I recently decided to switch my attention from learning Racket to Chez Scheme. One of the reasons that I chose Racket was because of how easy it is to get up and running. Setting up a development environment for Chez requires jumping through a few more hoops. In this post, I document those hoops. Disclaimer: The suggestions in this post may not represent best practice. I will update the post as I become more experienced with Chez and Emacs.