home-directory in .kawarc.scm; kawa.init for SLIB; hash tables

[Doug Orleans <dougo at ccs dot neu dot edu>]

Hi, I just joined the kawa list.  I have a bug report, a suggestions,
and a question.

Bug: if you refer to home-directory in your ~/.kawarc.scm init file,
it throws an UnboundSymbol exception.  This looks like a pretty simple 
fix to kawa.repl.checkInit(),  but I haven't tried it.

Suggestion: I've been writing a kawa.init for SLIB, and just noticed
that someone posted one to this list in 1999.  Perhaps you could put
this on the Kawa home page, or else make some sort of third-party
contrib directory/page?  (Or, just add it to the main distribution.)
I can send you my version if you like; it's a little more up to date
with respect to Kawa features.

Question: has anyone written a Scheme interface to the Java Hashtable
(or HashMap) class?  I don't like the SLIB hashtable implementation
for various reasons (e.g. doesn't use an opaque type, doesn't allow
for a user-defined hash function) and rather than writing one from
scratch I figured it'd make sense to just piggy-back onto Java's.  But
no sense in doing the work if someone else has already done it.  (This
would be another candidate for a contrib page.)

Thanks,
--Doug Orleans
Northeastern University
dougo@ccs.neu.edu