README

   1 This is a nightly snapshot of Guile, a portable, embeddable Scheme
   2 implementation written in C.  Guile provides a machine independent
   3 execution platform that can be linked in as a library when building
   4 extensible programs.
   5
   6 Please send bug reports to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.
   7
   8
   9 Important Facts About Snapshots ======================================
  10
  11     Please keep in mind that these sources are strictly experimental;
  12     they will usually not be well-tested, and may not even compile on
  13     some systems.  They may contain interfaces which will change.
  14     They will usually not be of sufficient quality for use by people
  15     not comfortable hacking the innards of Guile.  Caveat!
  16
  17     However, we're providing them anyway for several reasons.  We'd like
  18     to encourage people to get involved in developing Guile.  People
  19     willing to use the bleeding edge of development can get earlier access
  20     to new, experimental features.  Patches submitted relative to recent
  21     snapshots will be easier for us to evaluate and install, since the
  22     patch's original sources will be closer to what we're working with.
  23     And it allows us to start testing features earlier.
  24
  25 The Guile snapshots are available via anonymous FTP from
  26 alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu, as /gnu/guile-snap.tar.gz.
  27
  28 Via the web, that's:  ftp://alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/guile-snap.tar.gz
  29 For getit, that's:    alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu:/gnu/guile-snap.tar.gz
  30
  31
  32 Contents Of This Distribution ========================================
  33
  34 Interesting files include:
  35 - INSTALL, which contains instructions on building and installing Guile.
  36 - NEWS, which describes user-visible changes since the last release of Guile.
  37 - COPYING, which describes the terms under which you may redistribute
  38   Guile, and explains that there is no warranty.
  39
  40 The Guile source tree is laid out as follows:
  41
  42 doc:    Documentation for Guile, in Texinfo form.
  43 libguile:
  44         The Guile Scheme interpreter, packaged as an object library
  45         for you to link with your programs.
  46 guile:  An interactive front end for the Guile Scheme interpreter.
  47 rx:     A regular expression matching library, interfaced to Guile.
  48 ice-9:  Guile's module system, initialization code, and other infrastructure.
  49 lang:   A Guile module of tools for writing lexical analyzers and parsers.
  50 ctax:   A Guile module providing a C-like syntax for Scheme.
  51 gtcltk-lib:
  52         Glue code for talking to Tcl/Tk from Guile.  The Tcl/Tk
  53         developers have big plans for the next major release of Tcl/Tk
  54         which will make possible a clean, direct interface between
  55         Guile and Tk, so we're providing this very simple-minded
  56         interface until that's ready.
  57 threads: Glue code for using various threads packages from Guile, including
  58         qt (see below).
  59
  60 This distribution also includes `qt', a cooperative threads package
  61 from Washington University, which Guile can use.  Qt is under a
  62 separate copyright; see `qt/README' for more details.
  63
  64 The mailing list `guile@cygnus.com' carries discussions, questions,
  65 and often answers, about Guile.  To subscribe, send mail to
  66 guile-request@cygnus.com.  Of course, please send bug reports (and
  67 fixes!) to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.
  68
  69
  70 Authors And Contributors =============================================
  71
  72 George Carrette wrote SIOD, a stand-alone scheme interpreter.
  73 Although most of this code as been rewritten or replaced over time,
  74 the garbage collector from SIOD is still an important part of Guile.
  75
  76 Aubrey Jaffer seriously tuned performance and added features.  He
  77 designed many hairy parts of the tag system and evaluator.
  78
  79 Tom Lord librarified SCM, yielding Guile.  He wrote Guile's operating
  80 system, Ice-9, and connected Guile to Tcl/Tk and the `rx' regular
  81 expression matcher.
  82
  83 Gary Houston wrote the Unix system call support, including the socket
  84 support.
  85
  86 Anthony Green wrote the original version of `threads' the interface
  87 between Guile and qt.
  88
  89 Mikael Djurfeldt designed and implemented:
  90 * the source-level debugger,
  91 * stack overflow detection,
  92 * the GDB patches to support debugging mixed Scheme/C code,
  93 * the original implementation of weak hash tables,
  94 * the `threads' interface (rewriting Anthony Green's work), and
  95 * detection of circular references during printing.
  96
  97 Gary Houston did a lot of work on the error handling code.