This is release 1.3 of Guile, Project GNU's extension language library. Guile is an interpreter for Scheme, packaged as a library that you can link into your applications to give them their own scripting language. Guile will eventually support other languages as well, giving users of Guile-based applications a choice of languages. Please send bug reports to bug-guile@gnu.org. About This Distribution ============================================== Building and installing this distribution gives you: guile --- a stand-alone interpreter for Guile, usually installed in /usr/local/bin. With no arguments, this is a simple interactive Scheme interpreter. It can also be used as an interpreter for script files; see the NEWS file for details. guile-config --- a Guile script which provides the information necessary to link your programs against the Guile library. guile-snarf --- a script to parse declarations in your C code for Scheme-visible C functions, Scheme objects to be used by C code, etc. libguile.a --- an object library containing the Guile interpreter, usually installed in /usr/local/lib. You can use Guile in your own programs by linking against this. libqthreads.a --- an object library containing the QuickThreads primitives. If you enabled thread support when you configured Guile, you will need to link your code against this too. , , --- header files for libguile.a, usually installed in /usr/local/include. ice-9, ice-9/*.scm --- run-time support for Guile: the module system, read-eval-print loop, some R4RS code and other infrastructure. Usually installed in /usr/local/share/guile/. data-rep.info --- An essay on how to write C code that works with Guile Scheme values. 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: libguile: The Guile Scheme interpreter --- both the object library for you to link with your programs, and the executable you can run. ice-9: Guile's module system, initialization code, and other infrastructure. guile-config: Source for the guile-config script. qt: A cooperative threads package from the University of Washington, which Guile can use. If you configure Guile with the --with-threads flag, you will need to link against the -lqt library, found in this directory. Qt is under a separate copyright; see `qt/README' for more details. doc: Some preliminary documentation for Guile. The real Guile manual is incomplete, and is currently being revised. doc/example-smob: Sample code, discussed in the preliminary documentation above, for a program that extends Guile with a new data type, and functions that operate on it. Anonymous CVS Access and FTP snapshots =============================== We make the developers' working Guile sources available via anonymous CVS, and by nightly snapshots, accessible via FTP. See the files `ANON-CVS' and `SNAPSHOTS' for details. If you would like to receive mail when people commit changes to the Guile CVS repository, you can subscribe to guile-cvs@egcs.cygnus.com by sending a message to guile-cvs-subscribe@egcs.cygnus.com. Even better, you can get daily digests of these commit messages by sending a message to guile-cvs-digest-subscribe@egcs.cygnus.com. If you want to subscribe an e-mail address other than the one that appears in your From: header, say foo@bar.com, send a mail note to guile-cvs-subscribe-foo=bar.com@egcs.cygnus.com. Hacking It Yourself ================================================== As distributed, Guile needs only an ANSI C compiler and a Unix system to compile. However, Guile's makefiles, configuration scripts, and a few other files are automatically generated, not written by hand. If you want to make changes to the system (which we encourage!) you will find it helpful to have the tools we use to develop Guile. They are the following: Autoconf 2.13 --- a system for automatically generating `configure' scripts from templates which list the non-portable features a program would like to use. Available in "ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf" Automake 1.4 --- a system for automatically generating Makefiles that conform to the (rather Byzantine) GNU coding standards. The nice thing is that it takes care of hairy targets like 'make dist' and 'make distclean', and automatically generates Makefile dependencies. Automake is available in "ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake" Before using automake, you may need to copy `threads.m4' and `guile.m4' from the top directory of the Guile core disty to `/usr/local/share/aclocal. libtool 1.2f --- a system for managing the zillion hairy options needed on various systems to produce shared libraries. Available in "ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu". You are lost in a little maze of automatically generated files, all different. > Obtaining Guile ====================================================== The latest official Guile release is available via anonymous FTP from prep.ai.mit.edu, as /pub/gnu/guile-1.3.tar.gz. Via the web, that's: ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/guile-1.3.tar.gz For getit, that's: prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu/guile-1.3.tar.gz The mailing list `guile@cygnus.com' carries discussions, questions, and often answers, about Guile. To subscribe, send mail to guile-request@cygnus.com. Of course, please send bug reports (and fixes!) to bug-guile@gnu.org. Note that one address is @cygnus.com, and the other is at @gnu.org. Authors And Contributors ============================================= Many people have generously contributed to Guile. However, any errors are the responsibility of the primary Guile maintainer, Jim Blandy. Mikael Djurfeldt designed and implemented: * the source-level debugging support (although the debugger's user interface is not yet complete) * stack overflow detection, * the GDB patches to support debugging mixed Scheme/C code, * the original implementation of weak hash tables, * enhancements to the `threads' interface (based on Anthony Green's work), and * detection of circular references during printing. Mark Galassi contributed the Guile high-level functions (gh_*), and wrote the guile-programmer and guile-user manuals. (These are in the process of revision.) Anthony Green wrote the original version of `threads', the interface between Guile and qt. Gary Houston wrote much of the Unix system call support, including the socket support, and did a lot of work on the error handling code. Tom Lord librarified SCM, yielding Guile. He wrote Guile's operating system, Ice-9, and connected Guile to Tcl/Tk and the `rx' regular expression matcher. Aubrey Jaffer is the author of SCM upon which Guile is based. Guile started from SCM version 4e1 in November -94 and is still largely composed of the original SCM code. George Carrette wrote SIOD, a stand-alone scheme interpreter. Although most of this code as been rewritten or replaced over time, the garbage collector from SIOD is still an important part of Guile.