Script the Scheme REPL with Expect

Routinely I want to open the Chez Scheme REPL in my code dir and load my standard libraries; I’ve been copy-pasting from a Stickies to get my setup each time, because you can’t easily set a common prelude from command line. Finally solved that.

In ~/bin/scheme-repl, I put:

#!/usr/bin/env expect -f
log_user 0
cd "$env(HOME)/Code/CodeChez"
spawn scheme
expect "> "
send -- "(import (chezscheme) (marklib) (marklib-os)"
send -- "  (only (srfi s1 lists) delete drop-right last)"
send -- "  (only (srfi s13 strings) string-delete string-index string-index-right string-join string-tokenize) )\n"
log_user 1
interact

(make sure to change the path to wherever you keep your Scheme scripts, and whatever imports you like)

Added alias s=scheme-repl to my .zshrc

Now I can just hit one letter for shortcut:

% s
(import (chezscheme) (marklib) (marklib-os)  (only (srfi s1 lists) delete drop
-right last)  (only (srfi s13 strings) string-delete string-index string-index-r
ight string-join string-tokenize) )
> (os-path 'pwd)
"/Users/mdh/Code/CodeChez"
>

You can sort of do the same thing with a Chez boot file, but I wasn’t able to get it to load libraries from thunderchez, even with –libdirs flag, so screw it.

I’d forgotten everything I ever knew about expect, and the only resources online are exact copies of the same “log into ssh with expect!” (which you should never do! Set up SSH keys for Cthulhu’s sake!) tutorial over and over again, so had to read the man page to make even this trivial thing work.