Projects : gscm : gscm_usrbin
| 1 | About |
| 2 | ----- |
| 3 | |
| 4 | This is Gales Scheme: a Scheme interpreter for Unix striving for simplicity, soundness, minimal artificial restrictions, and R5RS compliance with strict error checking. |
| 5 | |
| 6 | Written by Jacob Welsh for JWRD Computing. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | Prerequisites |
| 9 | ------------- |
| 10 | |
| 11 | gcc, targetting an x86_64 POSIX environment. Linux and OpenBSD are known to work. Other ISAs are supportable in principle but there's presently some assembly math code lacking portable equivalent. |
| 12 | |
| 13 | Installation |
| 14 | ------------ |
| 15 | |
| 16 | This software ignores some historical Unix conventions in favor of a simplified variant of Bernstein's /package scheme ( http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html ). Installation paths and command names are not configurable, which amounts to a global namespace claim, such that people and programs can count on finding components at known paths if they are to be found at all. User commands are symlinked into /usr/bin and will replace prior files in case of conflict; see "package/commands" for the list. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | You will need root privileges to install. |
| 19 | |
| 20 | 1. Create the top-level /package directory if necessary and place the tree at its fully version-qualified path: |
| 21 | |
| 22 | mkdir -p /package |
| 23 | cp -r /YOUR/PATH/TO/gscm /package/gscm-0.40.6 |
| 24 | |
| 25 | 2. Run the install script from the above directory: |
| 26 | |
| 27 | cd /package/gscm-0.40.6 |
| 28 | sh package/install |
| 29 | |
| 30 | 3. Run the test suite if you like: |
| 31 | |
| 32 | sh package/check |
| 33 | |
| 34 | Known failures at present include, from tests/numbers.scm: |
| 35 | |
| 36 | (fail inexact-read-precision) : float formatting and parsing algorithms are imprecise. |
| 37 | (fail 1 1 expt13) : (expt 1 -1) returns an inexact (float) result when it could be exact. |
| 38 | |
| 39 | From tests/semantic-bad.scm: |
| 40 | |
| 41 | (fail unary-add-type bad-type) |
| 42 | (fail unary-mul-type bad-type) : the single-argument passthrough base case for + and * doesn't bother checking for numbers. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | To revert to this version after installing a different one, simply repeat step 2. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | Usage notes |
| 47 | ----------- |
| 48 | |
| 49 | See "gscm -h" for CLI options. |
| 50 | |
| 51 | The main shortfalls with respect to R5RS are the macro language and advanced numeric types (rational and complex). Arbitrary precision (bignum) integer arithmetic is supported. |
| 52 | |
| 53 | A number of extensions are provided including system interface, sockets, and fixnum arithmetic; see doc/extensions.txt for (incomplete) details. |
| 54 | |
| 55 | Error recovery, debugging, and concurrency support are known weaknesses (no help from the standard here). |