From: ····@panix.com
Subject: Russ McManus will speak on Guile to LXNY on Friday April 11 1997
Date:
Message-ID: <5i6b2i$j6@panix3.panix.com>
at the second LXNY meeting of 1997.
Russ McManus, serious *n*x hacker and Linux user since Before 1.0, will
speak at Mariella's Pizza at 225 West 57-th Street in New York City at
6:30 pm on Friday, April 11, 1997. Mariella's is near to Coliseum Books,
and across the street from the Duane Reade drugstore. Columbus Circle is
near by. For those who dare to bring a car into Manhattan, there do exist
parking lots, but we have been informed by the City of New York that there
are no more municipal parking lots or garages.
Russ will speak on Guile, the extension language of the GNU project.
As Richard M. Stallman has forcefully pointed out Linux owes much to
Project GNU. Linus Torvalds, before any public statements by Stallman on
Linux, said: "The most important decision made in the design of the Linux
kernel was to place it under the GNU Public License."
A complete working system for a computer, or a system of computers, that
actually allows for work to get done on the machine is more than just a
kernel, and more than just a kernel and some file systems, and some
compilers, and some "applications programs". A programming language which
can control the tasks the system performs in a way similar to the way that
a human being sitting at a terminal runs the system is needed. Such
languages are called "scripting languages". Most Unix shells today come
equipped with their own scripting languages, each one slightly different
from the others. Much of the success of Unix is due to the easy exercise
of the power to control that such shell scripting languages provide the
user. But most old shell scripting languages suffer from a lack of
system. Project GNU has proposed and with the help of many volunteers,
including Russ McManus, written the cleaner and more powerful scripting
language Guile.
Many hacker projects are better in the dream, in the design, and even in
the coding, than in the use. Hacking the Better is one thing. Everyday
use is something else. Russ McManus works today at Goldman Sachs writing
and supporting a system used for trading international equities in world
markets and uses Guile in his work. In addition to bug fixes for Guile
itself, which fixes have been merged into the source tree, Russ has also
written guile interfaces to Sybase, Reuter's real time data distribution
library, and he is presently working on a guile-based spreadsheet.
If possible rsvps from those intending to come should be sent to
····@panix.com as soon as possible, so that we have some idea of how many
to expect. But come, even if you do not send an rsvp. If you are late
that is all right too.
Michael Smith, ·······@panix.com
Jay Sulzberger, ····@panix.com
The Interim Committee for Visitors of Linux New York.
LXNY is Linux New York, New York's Linux organization.
Here are some web sites having to do with Guile:
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/scheme-home.html
http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs
http://web.egr.msu.edu/VISTA/Docs/Pgrt/raw
http://www.cygnus.com/ml/gel
http://www.sunlabs.com/people/john.ousterhout/scripting.html
Quoted below is the Guile page from the Free Software Foundation site
http://www.fsf.org .
>
> GUILE, GNU's Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extension, is a
> library that implements the Scheme language plus various convenient
> facilities. It's designed so that you can link it into an application
> or utility to make it extensible. Our plan is to link this library
> into all GNU programs that call for extensibility.
>
>
> Version 1.0 of GUILE was released in early January, 1997. The chief
> developer of GUILE is
>
> Jim Blandy (web site: http://www.cyclic.com/~jimb)
>
> who took over from Tom Lord in July 1996.
>
>
> Libraries that provide an interpreter for extensibility are not new.
> But most of them implement ``scripting languages'' that were not
> designed to be as powerful as a real programming language. GUILE uses
> Scheme, a powerful yet simple dialect of Lisp. One advantage of GUILE
> over TCL is that Scheme is a more powerful language. Scheme was
> designed as a ``programming language'', not as a ``scripting
> language''. Scheme is also simpler and cleaner than other extension
> languages such as Perl and Python.
>
>
> But the big advantage of GUILE is that it <em>allows support for
> multiple languages</em>. This is because Scheme is powerful enough
> that other languages can conveniently be translated into it.
>
>
> We have already implemented one translator, CTAX, which understands
> simple C-like language. This means that any application program which
> is linked with GUILE supports the CTAX language as well as Scheme.
> Any user can decide, at run time, to load the CTAX translator and
> start typing programs in CTAX. The application developer does not
> need to do anything special to support CTAX.
>
>
> Ultimately we hope to have translators for Perl, Python, TCL, REXX and
> Emacs Lisp---plus any other languages that users like. Users can
> write their own translators for their other languages, too. A
> translator should substitute for the Scheme <STRONG>read</STRONG> function;
> it should read text and return a Scheme expression which could then be
> evaluated. Translators should be written in Scheme so that a user can
> load them into GUILE at run time.
>
>
> GUILE supports an interface to Tk, so it can be used for graphical
> programs. By the time of the first release, we want to add a facility
> for executing system calls and a facility for running pipelines.
>
>
> The immediate impetus for starting work on GUILE was the popularity of
> TCL. Unlike GUILE, the TCL library does not support multiple
> languages. So if an application developer chooses to use the TCL
> library, all its users are <em>forced</em> to program in TCL.
>
>
> Some users like to program in TCL, and we're glad to let them have
> that option. But we want to have other choices as well. GUILE is
> meant to give the user more choices.
>
>
> We'd like it to be clear that GNU project in no way disapproves of the
> TCL project. TCL is free software; ethically, TCL is just as good as
> other free language implementations--no better and no worse. Choosing
> between languages to support is purely a technical issue.
>
>
> However, it is an important technical issue. In theory, other
> languages could be translated into TCL just as they are translated
> into Scheme. In practice, TCL is not powerful enough for that to
> work. It would be absurd to implement Scheme, or Emacs Lisp, by
> translating them into TCL.
>
>
> Therefore, a project like GUILE is crucial for the technical
> capabilities of the GNU system.
>
>
> Although GUILE is still in development, we already have a catchy
> slogan for it:
>
>
> ``Aren't you glad you use GUILE? Don't you wish everybody did?''
>
>
>
> Copyright (C) 1996, 1997 Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
> 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA
>
> Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted
> in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.
>
> Updated:
>
> 27 Mar 1997 tower