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ARS plusplus

Table of contents
1 History
2 ARS++ explained by its name
3 See also

History

ARS++ has been developed in 2002 for the book Undiluted Programming (a description of the book is available on page [1]) to demonstrate ARS based programming in a real world context. ARS++ is used in the book to implement an A++ interpreter and an XML Database System. Even the implementation of ARS++ in C was used to demonstrate ARS based programming.

Principally the programming language Scheme would have been perfectly alright to be used for these demonstration programs if Scheme would include primitives supporting network programming, database programming plus a few others required in this context.

The definition of the programming language Scheme does not include those primitives however, leaving this issue up to the implementors of the language. The consequence is that there exist many Scheme implementations, almost none of them covering all areas essential for real application programs.

This is the historical background that gave birth to the development of ARS++.

A few weeks ago the author of the referenced book discovered a Scheme implementation that would have been very well suited to serve as a language for developing the case studies for 'Undiluted Programming'. This Scheme implementation is called Gauche and is available for download in the internet on the following page [1].

ARS++ explained by its name

The name ARS++, being an acronym for ARS + Scheme + Extensions, indicates that ARS++ has a lot to do with Scheme but that it is not equivalent to Scheme.

From a practical point of view a Scheme implementation that includes support for regular expressions, databases, sockets and also provides an interface to the operating system can be called an ARS++ language (ignoring the difference in the nucleus which practically is only noticed by the programmer when using the special form define).

See also