The Guile License
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The license of Guile consists of the GNU GPL plus a special statement giving blanket permission to link with non-free software.  This is the license statement as found in any individual file that it applies to:

     This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

     This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

     You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this software; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

     As a special exception, the Free Software Foundation gives permission for additional uses of the text contained in its release of GUILE.

     The exception is that, if you link the GUILE library with other files to produce an executable, this does not by itself cause the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License.  Your use of that executable is in no way restricted on account of linking the GUILE library code into it.

     This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.

     This exception applies only to the code released by the Free Software Foundation under the name GUILE.  If you copy code from other Free Software Foundation releases into a copy of GUILE, as the General Public License permits, the exception does not apply to the code that you add in this way.  To avoid misleading anyone as to the status of such modified files, you must delete this exception notice from them.

     If you write modifications of your own for GUILE, it is your choice whether to permit this exception to apply to your modifications.  If you do not wish that, delete this exception notice.

Layout of this Manual
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This manual is divided into five parts.

Part I: Introduction to Guile provides an overview of what Guile is and how you can use it.  A whirlwind tour shows how Guile can be used interactively and as a script interpreter, how to link Guile into your own applications, and how to write modules of interpreted and compiled code for use with Guile.  All of the ideas introduced here are documented in full by the later parts of the manual.

Part II: Guile Scheme documents the core Scheme language and features that Guile implements.  Although the basis for this is the Scheme language described in R5RS, this part of the manual does not assume any prior familiarity with R5RS in particular, or with Scheme in general.  Basic Scheme concepts, standard aspects of the Scheme language and Guile extensions on top of R5RS are all documented from scratch, and organized by functionality rather than by the defining standards.

Part III: Guile Modules describes some important modules, distributed as part of the Guile distribution, that extend the functionality provided by the Guile Scheme core, most notably:

  * the POSIX module, which provides Scheme level procedures for system and network programming, conforming to the POSIX standard

  * the SLIB module, which makes Aubrey Jaffer's portable Scheme library available for use in Guile.

Part IV: Guile Scripting documents the use of Guile as a script interpreter, and illustrates this with a series of examples.

Part V: Extending Applications Using Guile explains the options available for using Guile as a application extension language.  At the simpler end of the scale, an application might use Guile to define some application-specific primitives in C and then load an application Scheme file.  In this case most of the application code is written on the Scheme level, and uses the application-specific primitives as an extension to standard Scheme.  At the other end of the scale, an application might be predominantly written in C --- with its main control loop implemented in C --- but make occasional forays into Scheme to, say, read configuration data or run user-defined customization code. This part of the manual covers the complete range of application extension options.

Finally, the appendices explain how to obtain the latest version of Guile, how to install it, where to find modules to work with Guile, and how to use the Guile debugger.