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Re: Kawa applications/projects?


"Paul R. Potts" <potts@umich.edu> writes:

> The manual could still use a section entitled "using Kawa as an embedded
> scripting language" right in line after the "compiling scheme code to
> byte-codes" section and before the "Extensions" section.

Sounds like a good idea.

The manual has concentrated on being a reference manual.
It does need some more tutorial or "cook-book" info.
The question is whether to mingle the tutorial and reference
information, and have them in separate parts of the manual.
For now, unless we do a more extensive re-write, it may
make sense to have tutorial sections and reference manterial
relatively close to each other (in the same "chapter"?),
and links between them.

(I would like to convert the manual to docbook.  I've had
promising results using the xalan xslt processor from apache
to convert docbook to html and nice latex.)

> Really, I see this is an important use for kawa: being able to, from another
> Java program (applet, application, etc.), create a new environment and
> interpreter combination, execute commands, set values, retrieve values, and
> eventually exit. It is the whole rationale behind our use of Kawa.

You mean from Java code execute Scheme commands and set/retrieve Scheme
values?

> I will volunteer to write this section,

Great!

> but I am still having a great deal
> of trouble making sense of environments, environment chaining, and their
> relationship to bindings and the interpreter object. It seems like these are
> viewed as secondary means of accessing the Kawa tool

Well, it is partly that these are "meta-features" which you should
generally not be using in Scheme code - but which you may need to use
when you are mixing Scheme and Java!  It also also that some aspects
of the API I'm still not completely sure about.  However, that should not
prevent us from documenting what we have.

I wrote a paper that discusses how Kawa works, but it is rather old.
See http://sourceware.cygnus.com/kawa/papers/ . I would like to update
and extend the "Kawa: Compiling Scheme to Java" paper, but haven't really
gotten around to it.  Still, if you haven't read it, you should.

Still, if you have a question on a topic, I will try to do a little
write-up on it - and maybe try to extend the "Compiling" paper at the
same time.
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/~per/

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