1. Jump Start

Before giving an overview of Guile, I present some simple commands and programs that you can type to get going immediately.

Start by invoking the Guile interpreter. Usually you do this by just typing guile. Then type (or paste) the following expressions at the prompt; the interpreter's response is preceded (in this manual) by ⇒.

<shell-prompt> guile

(+ 20 35)
⇒ 55
(define (recursive-factorial n)
  (if (zero? n)
      1
      (* n (recursive-factorial (- n 1)))))
(recursive-factorial 5)
⇒ 120
(quit)

In this example we did some simple arithmetic (+ 20 35) and got the answer 55. Then we coded the classic (and rather wasteful) factorial algorithm and computed the factorial of 55. Finally we quit with (quit).

We can find out about some of Scheme's nice features by asking for the factorial of some big number, say 500. On some systems the correct answer will be returned (I do not indicate calling and leaving the guile session anymore).

(recursive-factorial 500)
⇒ 1220136825991110068701238785423046926253574342803192842192413588
   3858453731538819976054964475022032818630136164771482035841633787
   2207817720048078520515932928547790757193933060377296085908627042
   9174547882424912726344305670173270769461062802310452644218878789
   4657547771498634943677810376442740338273653974713864778784954384
   8959553753799042324106127132698432774571554630997720278101456108
   1188373709531016356324432987029563896628911658974769572087926928
   8712817800702651745077684107196243903943225364226052349458501299
   1857150124870696156814162535905669342381300885624924689156412677
   5654481886506593847951775360894005745238940335798476363944905313
   0623237490664450488246650759467358620746379251842004593696929810
   2226397195259719094521782333175693458150855233282076282002340262
   6907898342451712006207714640979456116127629145951237229913340169
   5523638509428855920187274337951730145863575708283557801587354327
   6888868012039988238470215146760544540766353598417443048012893831
   3896881639487469658817504506926365338175055478128640000000000000
   0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
   00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The result is an example of Scheme's bignumbers. However, there are operating environments that provide (by default) too little stack space. They will instead produce an error message like this:

(recursive-factorial 500)
-|
ERROR: Stack overflow
ABORT: (stack-overflow)

Rather than enlarging the system's stack, we can implement the algorithm such that it does not consume increasing stack space. This is called a tail recursive implementation. The following definition is tail recursive and so should work on all systems.

(define (tail-recursive-factorial n)
  (define (loop k l)
    (if (zero? k) l
	(loop (- k 1) (* k l))))
  (loop n 1))

(tail-recursive-factorial 500)
⇒ 1220136825991110068701238785423046926253574342803192842192413588
        ;; ... skipped

This is the most basic use of Guile: a simple Scheme interpreter. In the rest of this tutorial I will show you how Guile has many facets: it is also an extensible interpreter (to which many features can be easilly added) and an embeddable interpreter (which can be invoked from your C programs).

[ < ]

[ > ]

[ << ]

[ Up ]

[ >> ]

[Top]

[Contents]

[Index]

[ ? ]