new to guile, how to go ahead ?

[Klaus Schilling <Klaus.Schilling@home.ivm.de>]

Vardhan Varma writes:

 > 	What exactly i should be needing. do i need slib, or is
 > it with guile , or is it not at all needed ?.

Slib is not needed, just comes in handy at one or the other occasion.

 > 	what are the guile functions for, say opendir etc . are they
 > 	'builtin' or seperate modules ?.

Yet they are built in, but should become separated in order to reduce
startup time.

 > 	which is library for x11 ( i saw some lib for scm), ncurses ?

for x11 there's something by julian satchell, dunno where, there's
better support for some X toolkits, especially for gtk by M. Vollmer.
I made something for curses, but it is yet buggy and will soon 
become obsoleted when the new garbage collector and interface for
imported datatypes changes.
 > 
 > 	is there any relation between scm, rscheme, elk, guile. do 
 > 	libraries like slib work on all.( because i saw mention of
 > 	guile in some rscheme library ).
 > 
scm is an ancestor of guile. rscheme and elk aren't related, they are
just different implementations of scheme.
 > 
 > 	last but not the least, is guile good vehicle  to learn scheme ( i'm
 > conservant with lisp  ).
 > 	
 > 	Lastly, what are the main point of difference in scheme and lisp.
 > 
Scheme uses one namespace for both function and variable identifiers,
adhers closely to the lambda calculus, it distinguishes empty lists 
from boolean falseness, and supports first-class continuations.

Klaus Schilling