README

   1 This is a nightly snapshot of Guile, the GNU extension language
   2 library.  Please send bug reports to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.
   3
   4 IMPORTANT FACTS ABOUT SNAPSHOTS:
   5
   6     Please keep in mind that these sources are strictly experimental;
   7     they will usually not be well-tested, and may not even compile on
   8     some systems.  They may contain interfaces which will change.
   9     They will usually not be of sufficient quality for use by people
  10     not comfortable hacking the innards of Guile.  Caveat!
  11
  12     However, we're providing them anyway for several reasons.  We'd like
  13     to encourage people to get involved in developing Guile.  People
  14     willing to use the bleeding edge of development can get earlier access
  15     to new, experimental features.  Patches submitted relative to recent
  16     snapshots will be easier for us to evaluate and install, since the
  17     patch's original sources will be closer to what we're working with.
  18     And it allows us to start testing features earlier.
  19
  20 Guile is a portable, embeddable Scheme implementation written in C.
  21 Guile provides a machine independent execution platform that can be
  22 linked in as a library when building extensible programs.
  23
  24 Guile is derived from SCM, by Aubrey Jaffer and others.  Tom Lord
  25 librarified SCM, yielding Guile.  He wrote Guile's operating system,
  26 Ice-9, connected Guile to Tcl/Tk and the `rx' regular expression
  27 matcher, and took care of a lot of miscellany.
  28
  29 Interesting files include:
  30 - INSTALL, which contains instructions on building and installing Guile.
  31 - NEWS, which describes user-visible changes since the last release of Guile.
  32 - COPYING, which describes the terms under which you may redistribute
  33   Guile, and explains that there is no warranty.
  34
  35 The Guile source tree is laid out as follows:
  36
  37 doc:    Documentation for Guile, in Texinfo form.
  38 libguile:
  39         The Guile Scheme interpreter, packaged as an object library
  40         for you to link with your programs.
  41 guile:  An interactive front end for the Guile Scheme interpreter.
  42 rx:     A regular expression matching library, interfaced to Guile.
  43 ice-9:  Guile's module system, initialization code, and other infrastructure.
  44 lang:   A Guile module of tools for writing lexical analyzers and parsers.
  45 ctax:   A Guile module providing a C-like syntax for Scheme.
  46 gtcltk-lib:
  47         Glue code for talking to tcl/tk from Guile.  The Tcl/Tk
  48         developers have big plans for the next major release of Tcl/Tk
  49         which will make possible a clean, direct interface between
  50         Guile and Tk, so we're providing this very simple-minded
  51         interface until that's ready.
  52
  53
  54 The mailing list `guile@prep.ai.mit.edu' carries discussions,
  55 questions, and often answers, about Guile.  To subscribe, send mail to
  56 guile-request@prep.ai.mit.edu.  Of course, please send bug reports
  57 (and fixes!) to bug-guile@prep.ai.mit.edu.