2.1 Introduction

I was fed up with some of the peculiarities of the R programming language at the same time that I started dipping my toes into the world of Scheme. The elegance of this language struck me. To be able for me to use it productively it would need to support scientific computing. So I started implementing libraries for bioinformatics, as I am most familiar with this field. I write this in the hope that it will get adopted and grow in popularity to the size of support scientific computing has in R or python. Surely this is a harebrained scheme!

Currently (harebrained scheme), as the library is called, contains procedures for bionformatics (in particular genomics). I plan to extend it with procudures for plotting.

2.1.1 Supported schemes

(harebrained scheme) is written in R6RS compliant scheme and requires only SRFI 43 support for vector operations not part of the standard. As such it should support most R6RS compliant Scheme implementations. It is currently tested on Chez, Racket (PLT scheme) and Guile. This should enable the user to choose the implementation most tailored to the target application. R6RS was chosen in favour of the more recent R7RS mostly because it includes record types with single inheritance which (harebrained scheme) makes copious use of.