The world of Guile!

Recently, I started working with Guile. This all stemmed from auditing a programming languages course last semester. We used Dr. Racket. At first, I thought that Dr. Racket was a toy and dismissed it as being a phony LISP tool. Actually, I hadn’t really understood LISP, but I took a dive into Dr. Racket to see what it is about. I discovered that it is a Scheme implementation and is pretty robust. I worked through the tutorial at which point it made a reference to Daniel P Friedman’s titled Essentials of Programming Languages. This caught my attention right away, so I immediately had to dig deeper. I bought the book off Amazon. But, at the same time, I discovered that my background still lacked. I looked for few tutorials and then something happened to my laptop and Dr. Racket wasn’t readily available, so I tried CLISP. I discovered CLISP is a different dialect, but then yet again discovered that Guile is an implementation of Scheme. Essentially, I was back on track for this programming languages book. I dug through some details, of the programming languages and somewhere I noticed the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I downloaded it and started reading. I also took a class where we did a language implementation using SML. The code we wrote was very concise and had a lot of power. It fit well with the grammar specification too. And, at the same time, Guile (scheme) seems to fit in a similar mold. So, I am basically trudging through this to see how much it can help me with writing my own language. This of course fits directly with my OSCON proposal to write your own interpretor. So, I hope this blog entry is not too much of an admission to actually learn the details in order to give a presentation. Well, I hope to illustrate enough background shortly!