Announcement: MzCOM

["Paul A. Steckler" <steck@cs.rice.edu>]

PLT has created a COM class with an embedded 
MzScheme, which we call MzCOM.  That means
you can run Scheme code from your favorite
COM host environment, such as Visual Basic,
Visual FoxPro, or even PLT's MysterX.

The source code is available from the PLT
anonymous CVS server at

	http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/anoncvs/

in the directories 

	plt/src/mzcom/

and

	plt/src/worksp/mzcom/

You need Visual C++ 6 to compile the sources.
The VC++ workspace is in the latter of the 
above two directories.  If you'd like a precompiled 
.DLL, I can send it by email; it's about 
500K.

This version of MzCOM is beta, but pretty solid.
We expect to have an official version with or soon after
the next PLT release.

Directions for use:

The ProgID for the COM class is "MzCOM.MzObj.102".
There is one method, Eval(), which takes and returns
a BSTR (BASIC string).  There is one event,
Error(), which takes a BSTR.  You'll need to
set PLTCOLLECTS in your environment if you want
to use MzScheme libraries.

If none of the COM stuff makes sense to you, I'll 
try my best to help you get it running.

Thanks to Andre Van Meulebrouck, who goaded me into
building MzCOM, and for testing with Visual Basic.

-- Paul

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| Paul Steckler              |     Rice University PLT           | 
| steck@cs.rice.edu          |     DrScheme Project              |
| Tel:  713/348-3814         |     http://www.cs.rice.edu/~steck |
| FAX:  713/348-5930         |     *** Ad astra per hackera ***  |
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