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Has anyone gotten the Church programming language to work on Windows? I followed the directions here and I wasn't able to run the examples in the tutorial in any obvious way. I used ikarus although I would be quite satisfied to use PLT Scheme (now Racket) if there was a clear way to do it.

For example, although I'm able to run

ikarus --r6rs-script test/church-test-suite.ss

at the end of the installation instructions, I'm not able to run a file containing

(import (church))

;; sample from a few church primitives
(church
 (define mean (gaussian 0 1))
 (define var (abs (gaussian 0 1)))
 (gaussian mean var)
 (flip 0.5)
 )
(exit)

which is the first example in the Getting Started with MIT-Church section, either if I run as 

ikarus --r6rs-script test/my-test.ss

or as 

ikarus test/my-test.ss

I've found that I can run something like this particular example if I abuse my header to look like the test suite, but this doesn't hold for some of the further examples in that section.

Normally I would suspect a bad library path on my side, but the echo looks good:

$ echo $IKARUS_LIBRARY_PATH
/cygdrive/c/mit-church:/cygdrive/c/mit-church/include

and, as mentioned before, the test cases run.

I've asked this question in the talk page for installation on their Wiki, and I'll see that the results of either forum get cross-posted.

John with waffle
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    Not familiar with Church, but it looks like Cygwin should provide the environment necessary for it. What problems are you running into using Ikarus? At what point does it stop working for you? – Perishable Dave May 12 '11 at 20:28
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    Have you tried (Petite) Chez Scheme? The 8.x versions support R6RS and I'd expect it to behave similarly to Ikarus. Precompiled binaries are quite easy to download and install. – erjiang May 13 '11 at 00:54
  • @Perishable Dave: now described in the comment above – John with waffle May 13 '11 at 10:36
  • @erjiang I haven't tried it yet. I'm thinking that its a library path issue, but Chez Scheme would be a nice independent confirmation. – John with waffle May 13 '11 at 10:36
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    If you do an "ECHO $IKARUS_LIBRARY_PATH" in Cygwin, does it show the path to Church? – Perishable Dave May 13 '11 at 17:06
  • @Perishable Dave: now included in the question above – John with waffle May 13 '11 at 18:33
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    Does French work on boats? The question title is complete nonsense. – newacct May 14 '11 at 07:07
  • @newacct I'll take suggestions. I could say "Does the programming language named Church run correctly on Windows?" Would that be better? – John with waffle May 14 '11 at 11:40
  • @newacct I think I see what you are saying. I think a better analogy is "Do cell phones work on boats in the Atlantic?" Of course, they don't have anything to do with each other technologically, and could be made to work with technical effort. Nonetheless, it's a practical question if there's a set of readily existing configurations by which they are actually made to work today, or if I'd be looking at some kind of novel electronics project. If you've used Church on Windows, I'm interested in how. I'll still accept that the question may not be optimally phrased. – John with waffle May 14 '11 at 15:46
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    Hrm, this may be inconsequential, but shouldn't it be a colon instead of a semi-colon that separates path listings? – Perishable Dave May 16 '11 at 18:36
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    @John the Statistician: I guess my issue was that, what does it mean for a programming language to "work"? A programming language just specifies rules for code, which is text. A text file "works" fine in any system. I guess what you are asking for is whether there is an existing compiler/interpreter which is convenient to set up and use on Windows. – newacct May 17 '11 at 07:17
  • @newacct Although we may disagree about some semantics, I think you understand what I'm getting at, although I don't care much about convenience per se. I'd go through a long install process if I had some guarantee it would work. I could say "Is there a demonstrated way to set up the Church Programming Language on Windows so that the example code functions?" Would that be an improvement? – John with waffle May 17 '11 at 11:22
  • @Perishable Dave: that's definitely a Windows slip on my part, good catch. It didn't seem to matter though – John with waffle May 17 '11 at 11:32
  • @newacct Or, even better, "Is there a demonstrated setup to run Church Programming Language programs on Windows?" – John with waffle May 17 '11 at 11:46
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    I'll give the installation a try on my Cygwin and let you know if I can come up with anything. – Perishable Dave May 17 '11 at 17:15

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