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thisrod | 1 year ago

I've finally gotten around to reading SICM, but I can't get MIT Scheme to install on the current OSX 14.2. Autoconf requires an old version of the OSX SDK. Has someone else already solved that problem?

I was surprised by how many ways Sussman and Wisdom found to modernise the Landau and Lipshitz treatment. There is the obvious change, where the first time they solve some equations of motion, it's done numerically, and the solution is chaotic.

There is also a more subtle change, where they keep sneaking in the concepts of differential geometry. The word "manifold" is reserved for a footnote, but if you know what tangent spaces and sprays are, it's straightforward to translate the "local tuples" and see what they're actually talking about.

I think this is a good idea. If physics undergraduates were exposed to manifolds and tangent spaces in their analytical mechanics course, then saw some exterior calculus in their first electromagnetism course, they might be ready for curvature and geodesics when they study general relativity.

discuss

order

i_don_t_know|1 year ago

I don't know if this is useful to you. I haven't tried to install MIT Scheme directly on macOS. Instead, I'm using the sample project at [1] to run a linux VM with Fedora on macOS x86-64. I was able to install MIT Scheme and scmutils on the VM by following the instructions at [2][3][4][5] for CentOS. It appears to have succeeded but I haven't really worked with the system yet.

I haven't tried the instructions for ARM-based macOS at [6] because I'm still on Intel.

It's less convenient to run a VM than to run on macOS directly. But I prefer to sandbox "random" software that way, and some things support linux better than macOS.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

[2] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/

[3] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/installation....

[4] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sys...

[5] https://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/documentation/stable...

[6] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/mechanics-sys...

(You have to install texinfo for the online documentation part of [5]. Skip the 'install-pdf' documentation target if you don't want to depend on tex/latex.)