Guile NEWS --- history of user-visible changes.  2 Aug 1996  -*- text -*-
Copyright (C) 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end for copying conditions.

Please send Guile bug reports to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.

Guile 1.0b3

Changes since Thursday, September 5:

* You can now run Guile without installing it.

Previous versions of the interactive Guile interpreter (`guile')
couldn't start up unless Guile's Scheme library had been installed;
they used the value of the environment variable `SCHEME_LOAD_PATH'
later on in the startup process, but not to find the startup code
itself.  Now Guile uses `SCHEME_LOAD_PATH' in all searches for Scheme
code.

To run Guile without installing it, build it in the normal way, and
then set the environment variable `SCHEME_LOAD_PATH' to a
colon-separated list of directories, including the top-level directory
of the Guile sources.  For example, if you unpacked Guile so that the
full filename of this NEWS file is /home/jimb/guile-1.0b3/NEWS, then
you might say

	export SCHEME_LOAD_PATH=/home/jimb/my-scheme:/home/jimb/guile-1.0b3

* Guile's header files should no longer conflict with your system's
header files.

In order to compile code which #included <libguile.h>, previous
versions of Guile required you to add a directory containing all the
Guile header files to your #include path.  This was a problem, since
Guile's header files have names which conflict with many systems'
header files.

Now only <libguile.h> need appear in your #include path; you must
refer to all Guile's other header files as <libguile/mumble.h>.
Guile's installation procedure puts libguile.h in $(includedir), and
the rest in $(includedir)/libguile.

* The compiled-library-path function has been deleted from libguile.

* A variable and two new functions have been added to libguile:

** The variable %load-path now tells Guile which directories to search
for Scheme code.  Its value is a list of strings, each of which names
a directory.

** (%search-load-path FILENAME) searches the directories listed in the
value of the %load-path variable for a Scheme file named FILENAME.  If
it finds a match, then it returns its full filename.  Otherwise, it
returns #f.  %search-load-path will not return matches that refer to
directories.

** (%try-load-path FILENAME :optional CASE-INSENSITIVE-P SHARP)
searches the directories listed in %load-path for a file named
FILENAME, and loads it if it finds it.  If it can't read FILENAME for
any reason, it throws an error.

The arguments CASE-INSENSITIVE-P and SHARP are interpreted as by the
%try-load function.



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Copyright (C) 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

   Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
   of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
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   Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
   of this document, or of portions of it,
   under the above conditions, provided also that they
   carry prominent notices stating who last changed them.