Re: questions about kawa (or possibly scheme)

[Malcolm Sparks <malcolm at congreve dot com>]

Hi Dan-

In short, yes you can create a kawa 'process' in the way you describe.  
You can instantiate kawa.standard.Scheme and call its eval() methods.  
You shouldn't even notice that Kawa may be compiling and classloading  
under the hood.

The Kawa docs are very good once you have a small grasp of Scheme.  
Start with the R5RS and also look at the SRFIs that Kawa supports (see  
section 3.1of the docs), especially SRFI 1.

I find the 'format' procedure very useful for writing strings, see  
3.14.5

My tip is to learn the Scheme/Java interface of Kawa and call out to  
Java for things you don't yet know how to do in Scheme. As you learn  
more Scheme you can go back and try to rely on Java less and less.

Kawa is brilliant once you get into it, so don't give up and keep  
asking questions...

Malcolm





On 9 Sep 2008, at 20:45, don-kawa@isis.cs3-inc.com (Don Cohen) wrote:

> Per Bothner writes:
>
> > > The main question is where I should look (if there is any such  
> > > place)
> > > for answers to questions such as those below.
> Since there's no answer, I guess this is the place.
>
> > > Is there something way to find what symbols have function bindings
> > > like *packages* and do-symbols ?
> >
> > Do remember that Kawa is very compiler-oriented.  So, to a large
> > extent is Scheme - especially R6RS.  Function bindings may be
> > local to a module or other scope, in which case they're not
> > accessible from a symbol or package.
> >
> > Kawa does have packages and a way to get at symbols, but it's
> > not really supported.  What do you need this for?  Perhaps
> > you'r asking the wrong question?
>
> I was hoping to browse the list and thus find functions/variables
> of interest.  What's the proper way to find out what's there?
> I tried looking at the latest scheme spec index but I don't see things
> like write -- which I just guessed by luck after print didn't work.
>
> At a higher level the objective is to write applications in lisp
> (I'm hoping scheme will suffice) while using java for the UI.
> I've been assuming that it's easy from a java app to create a kawa
> process, pass it strings to read/eval/print, get the string outputs
> from print and put them into the java UI.
> Is this plan impacted by kawa being compiler oriented, or anything
> else that you can tell?