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[bpt/guile.git] / README

This is a nightly snapshot of Guile, the GNU extension language
library.  Please send bug reports to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.

IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT SNAPSHOTS:

    Please keep in mind that these sources are strictly experimental;
    they will usually not be well-tested, and may not even compile on
    some systems.  They may contain interfaces which will change.
    They will usually not be of sufficient quality for use by people
    not comfortable hacking the innards of Guile.  Caveat!

    However, we're providing them anyway for several reasons.  We'd like
    to encourage people to get involved in developing Guile.  People
    willing to use the bleeding edge of development can get earlier access
    to new, experimental features.  Patches submitted relative to recent
    snapshots will be easier for us to evaluate and install, since the
    patch's original sources will be closer to what we're working with.
    And it allows us to start testing features earlier.

The Guile snapshots are available via anonymous FTP from
alpha.gnu.ai.mit.edu, as /gnu/guile-snap.tar.gz.

Guile is a portable, embeddable Scheme implementation written in C.
Guile provides a machine independent execution platform that can be
linked in as a library when building extensible programs.

Guile is derived from SCM, by Aubrey Jaffer and others.  Tom Lord
librarified SCM, yielding Guile.  He wrote Guile's operating system,
Ice-9, connected Guile to Tcl/Tk and the `rx' regular expression
matcher, and took care of a lot of miscellany.

Interesting files include:
- INSTALL, which contains instructions on building and installing Guile.
- NEWS, which describes user-visible changes since the last release of Guile.
- COPYING, which describes the terms under which you may redistribute
  Guile, and explains that there is no warranty.

The Guile source tree is laid out as follows:

doc:	Documentation for Guile, in Texinfo form.
libguile:
	The Guile Scheme interpreter, packaged as an object library
	for you to link with your programs.
guile:  An interactive front end for the Guile Scheme interpreter.
rx:     A regular expression matching library, interfaced to Guile.
ice-9:  Guile's module system, initialization code, and other infrastructure.
lang:   A Guile module of tools for writing lexical analyzers and parsers.
ctax:   A Guile module providing a C-like syntax for Scheme.
gtcltk-lib:
	Glue code for talking to tcl/tk from Guile.  The Tcl/Tk
	developers have big plans for the next major release of Tcl/Tk
	which will make possible a clean, direct interface between
	Guile and Tk, so we're providing this very simple-minded
	interface until that's ready.


The mailing list `guile@prep.ai.mit.edu' carries discussions,
questions, and often answers, about Guile.  To subscribe, send mail to
guile-request@prep.ai.mit.edu.  Of course, please send bug reports
(and fixes!) to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.