LISP In Small Pieces - best LISP environment to run code in?

Question

Christian Queinnec has written a masterpiece called LISP In Small Pieces, which features eleven Lisp Interpreters and two Lisp compilers.

When you go to download the code from the website here - it has the comment:

The programs of this book are available on the net. 
These programs used to run with some Scheme systems around 1994.

Any idea:

(a) What Scheme systems these ran on at the time, and more importantly;

(b) What Scheme systems these would run on today?

Answer 1

There's a lot of programs in there. I did a few tests to see how well I could answer this without having to try them individually. There are 131 files in the tarball with extension ".scm". However there appear to be Scheme programs with other extensions such as .bgl. So I did a search for files containing 'L i S P' in the first five lines. That yields 173 files. I tried running all of these on my preferred Scheme implementation. 31 of these run without error. Almost all of these are in the "src" directory. So the language-specific programs really do seem language-specific. Let's look at one of the src/ files that failed, "chap9z.scm". It's choking on define-abbreviation. I don't know the origin of this symbol, but it's not defined anywhere in guile. But all of its uses could be performed by guile's syntax-rules.