Re: New manual plan

[Jay Glascoe <jglascoe@jay.giss.nasa.gov>]

On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Jim Blandy wrote:

> 
> Here's an outline of what I want from the Guile manual.
<snip>
> It should assume that the reader understands C and Unix, but not
> Scheme.  Thus, it will include tutorials that cover Scheme itself.

The manual can and should assume some level of programming experience (in
something: Perl, Pascal, FORTRAN, shell,...).

> Here's the overall layout.  We're going to prioritize these, and do
> the detailed stuff first, and fill in the tutorial material afterwards.
> 
> - Road Map, Overview, whatever you want to call it.
> - The Four Faces of Guile
>   For people asking, "What is Guile for?"  Short sketches of the
>   following, 1-2 pages each:
>   - using Guile interactively
>   - using Guile for scripting
>   - writing shared libraries that provide Guile modules
>   - writing applications that use Guile as their extension language

I think you must throw in some comparisons to other scripting/extension
languages (maybe give a "top 5" list of Guile/Scheme's features, then say
how many of these 5 are/aren't met by Perl/Tcl/...)  Programmers thrive on
this kind of thing (lnguage-war fodder, strife,...   ;)

> - Guile language tutorial
>   Like the above, but tries to show things off more fully.  For people
>   who want to actually use Guile for something.
>   - interactive use
>   - scripting
>   - shared libraries
>   - extensible applications

I think a basic Scheme tutorial should be embedded in there somewhere.  It
should show how to define variables (bind values to symbols), how to
define a procedure (perhaps "defun" style notation would be best), how to
write your basic loop, how for-each and map are used, etc.


	Jay Glascoe
	jglascoe@jay.giss.nasa.gov