1 Introduction

Guile is an implementation of the Scheme programming language. Scheme (http://schemers.org/) is an elegant and conceptually simple dialect of Lisp, originated by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman, and since evolved by the series of reports known as RnRS (the Revised^n Reports on Scheme).

Unlike, for example, Python or Perl, Scheme has no benevolent dictator. There are many Scheme implementations, with different characteristics and with communities and academic activities around them, and the language develops as a result of the interplay between these. Guile’s particular characteristics are that

• it is easy to combine with other code written in C
• it has a historical and continuing connection with the GNU Project
• it emphasizes interactive and incremental programming
• it actually supports several languages, not just Scheme.

The next few sections explain what we mean by these points. The sections after that cover how you can obtain and install Guile, and the typographical conventions that we use in this manual.