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Jay Glascoe writes: > 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,...). Shouldn't that vary from chapter to chapter? > > > 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 The last 2 points should of course definitely require familarity with C programming, ANSI and maybe POSIX standard features. For interactive usage I would not want to assume profound C knowledge, nor for scripting. People who come from other r*rs scheme interpreters, and never did any low-levelish like programming, should not be disadvantaged. > > 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,... ;) > That should be done in the 'guile for scripting' part. People who are familiar with the C API of python, perl, ruby, pike and the like, but barely with Scheme, will be capable to dig their way through guile's C API much easier than scripters-only of non-schemish VHHL will have with scheme scripting in general, guile in particular. > > - Guile language tutorial > > Like the above, but tries to show things off more fully. For people > > who want to actually use Guile for something. Who does not? > > - 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. > This reminds me that I learnt Scheme, due to lack of textbooks available in Germany, directly from the r4rs standard by trial and error, plus by trying to use stuff from a CL textbook and check what works and what doesn't in Scheme. That was an ugly mess, I can tell you ... Klaus Schilling