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Comment by soegaard | Hacker News Reader

Is Scheme still used by Texas Instruments?

Cadence SKILL, which is heavily influenced by Scheme, is still actively used to extend functionality of the EDA tools. Other languages commonly seen used in TI is Perl, Tcl, C (obviously), assembly and Python.

Thanks for info.

Cadence? Any relation to Chez Scheme?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chez_Scheme

(Look at the box at the right?)

Don't think so. Here, Cadence refers to "Cadence Design Systems". "Cadence Research Systems" seems less clear. In any case, Chez Scheme was the long-term project of Kent Dybvig.

SKILL is such a weird language. It tries to be both a C and a Scheme, and ends up at a surprisingly ok compromise. I quite enjoyed working with it, which was beneficial since most of my colleagues did not...

Cadence has two separate languages, SKILL and SKILL++, using the same runtime. SKILL is derived from Franz Lisp, which is dynamically scoped. SKILL++ is influenced by Scheme. SKILL++ has lexical scoping and has an object system. Both languages allow a postfix notation that makes it superficially familiar to non-Lisp languages. IMHO, the Lisp style is more usable and readable.

SKILL++ is actually a pretty compliant Scheme, with a lot of compatibility to SKILL and quite a bit of Common Lisp added on top. What makes it a bit funny is the clever parser, which allows both prefix syntax as in

(setq x (plus a b))

as well as

x = a + b

(which just reads as the former expression). Personally, I prefer the Lisp style much - except for math expressions.

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