What is oscheme:
================

Oscheme stands for Objective Scheme. It is an embeddable scheme
interpretor conforming (mostly) to R4RS. Lots of non-R4RS extensions
are provided:

- regular expressions,
- system utilitites,
- process and socket modules (for UNIX only)
- autoload (both for scheme and object modules)
- autodoc package, to generate both on-line and HTML documentations
  from C and scheme sources.

It also include a prototype-based object model:

	The new syntactic form:

    [object (selector: args)* selector]

    extends scheme exactly like objective-C extends C syntax, "a la
smalltalk". This object model is prototype-based. Foreign language
structures can be turned into this kind of objets, which allows
end-programmer to extend them with new slots, and new methods, both in
C and in Scheme.

It is delivered as a standard library, which can be extended through a
C API, to:

	- declare new pritimive functions,
	- add primitive types
	- add foreign structure, by making them objects.

Finally, it uses a conservative GC:

	The oscheme binary is linked against Boehm's GC which can be
    ftp'ed from:

		parcftp.xerox.com/pub/gc4.2.tar.Z

	This helps extension writers by avoiding them the burden of ref
    counting, or protecting external data.

Beyond this, it is a (stack-based) byte-coded interpretor, with the
byte compiler written in C. It compares favorably (in speed, at least)
with current embeddable interpretors.

Available extensions:
=====================

Available extensions provides a scheme interface to:

    - regular expressions,
    - UNIX socket and processes,
    - the Motif toolkit,
    - the CERN libWWW.
    
The package "oscheme.tar.gz" contains all these stuff packed together.

Installation:
=============

Building 'oscheme' requires Boehm's gc (see above). Oscheme has been
compiled on the following precise <machine>-<vendor>-<system>:

     alpha-dec-osf1
     i386-unknown-linux
     mips-mips-riscos5.01
     mips-sgi-irix5.2
     mips-sony-news
     rs6000-ibm-aix
     sparc-sun-sunos4.1
     sparc-sun-sunos5.3

For all these systems, it should compile staright out of the box. For
more informations, see the file INSTALL in the top directory of the
distribution.

Documentation:
==============

	I'm testing an autodoc system, which allows to write code
    documentation using comments. The package is distributed with
    approriate documentation files, which might not be neither
    complete nor great.

	To have a try, at oscheme prompt:

	> (require "apropos")
	> (apropos "apropos")
	> (apropos "help")

    	The same documenation is also available in HTML format (see
the distribution).

Copyright:
==========

All sources are subject to the COPYRIGHT file found in the top
directory of the distribution, you should read it before installing
the software.

Any comments, suggestions, bug reports are welcome.

Thanks for your interest,

Anselm Baird-Smith,

Mail: Anselm.BairdSmith@inria.fr
WWW : http://www.inria.fr/koala/abaird.html