Talk:GNU Guile

Pronunciation
How do you pronounce Guile? &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.60.11.159 (talk &bull; contribs).


 * Probably the same way you do the word "guile". -- Gwern (contribs) 18:13, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

What it is
And this is what their page says:


 * "Guile is a library designed to help programmers create flexible applications. Using Guile in an application allows programmers to write plug-ins, or modules (there are many names, but the concept is essentially the same) and users to use them to have an application fit their needs."


 * "There is a long list of proven applications that employ extension languages. Successful and long-lived examples in the free software world are GNU Emacs and The GIMP."


 * "Very popular examples of extending server applications are the Apache projects Perl and PHP modules."


 * "Extension languages allow users, programmers, and third-party developers to add features to a program without having to re-write the program as a whole, and it allows people extending a program to co-operate with each other, without having to expend any extra effort."


 * "Guile is a programming language."


 * "Guile is an interpreter for the Scheme programming language, packaged as a library which can be incorporated into your programs. Your users have full access to the interpreter, so Guile itself can be extended, based on the needs of the user. The result is a scripting language tailored to your application."


 * "Guile gives your programs more power."


 * "Using Guile with your program makes it more usable. Users don't need to learn the plumbing of your application to customize it; they just need to understand Guile, and the access you've provided. They can easily trade and share features by downloading and creating scripts, instead of trading complex patches and recompiling their applications. They don't need to coordinate with you, or anyone else."

&mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.60.11.159 (talk &bull; contribs).

Scheme implementation
I remember hearing somewhere that the implementation of Scheme used by Guile was a rather non-standard Scheme as Scheme implementations go. Is this true? --Maru (talk) Contribs 06:10, 16 December 2005 (UTC)


 * It's been 8 years since the above question was asked, but I can say that as of today, 2013 August, it's not any less standard than most big implementations. Perhaps it was less sane before version 2.0 (2011). -- TaylanUB — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.217.71.36 (talk) 16:59, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

What licences?
The info box says Guile is a mix of LGPL and GPL. Other sources say it's a mix of GPL and GPL with a linking exception. Can someone give a link to clarify which is currently true? Maybe a mailing list archive or a file from an online copy of the source code would say thing? Gronky 09:49, 13 August 2007 (UTC)


 * says guile-core is under LGPL. --MarSch 10:22, 13 August 2007 (UTC)


 * It seems they changed from GPL plus linking exception to LGPL throughout: and before that used a mixture of GPL and GPL plus linking exception  --MarSch 10:28, 13 August 2007 (UTC)


 * According to What's the latest news? on Guile official page


 * """In fact Guile since 1.8.0 has been licensed with the GNU Lesser General Public License, and the few incorrect files have now been fixed to agree with the rest of the Guile distribution."""


 * it should be under LGPL after 1.8.0 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.171.235.53 (talk) 15:45, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Terminology conflict
There is a terminology conflict in the beginning section. Guile is described an an object library, by which it was meant (AFAICT) a standard static library, (an ar archive of object files). However, the link is a link to Object Libraries, which are libraries for OOP, containing the information that would normally be found in header files as part of the library format. This should probably just be fixed by removing object from the sentance, and moving the footnote to after the word library. Tacvek (talk) 00:15, 2 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Today, "object library" just forwards to "library (computing)" on Wikipedia, but anyway, the part you mention was removed/reworded entirely today. 2013 August -- TaylanUB — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.217.71.36 (talk) 17:02, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

What It Means:
The name "Guile" stands for "GNU's Ubiquitous Intelligent Language For Extension". note: this was taken from an Interview with GNU Guile Maintainer Marius Vollmer —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.139.221.201 (talk) 00:27, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Guile and Gnome
Is guile related to gnome? TeXmacs manual suggests that "the Guile Scheme dialect [is] from the Gnome project". --93.106.71.142 (talk) 12:03, 7 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Somewhat related, but not "from". They were both born under the GNU umbrella (GNOME's association was never as strong as Guile's and has become much vaguer over the years). In the early days of GNOME there was a pseudo-movement declaring advocating for embedding Guile anywhere an extension language was needed due to Guile's status as "the GNU extension language"--not to mention the fact that few other languages had runtimes with comperable easy of embeddable. Due to the diversification of the GNOME community and increasing ease of embedding more familiar languages like Python or Javascript, advocacy for Guile is a little less strong now. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.204.7.219 (talk) 22:31, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Tom Lord in the TCL wars
This might be of no importance, but if anyone's researching the "TCL wars", and you find emails with Richard Stallman's name in the "From: " field but the closing sig of Tom Lord, the reason seems to be that:


 * Some of my notes to you mysteriously transmogrified into a USENET post which the archives show as having you in the "From:" line and with my signature at the bottom of the message. This sparked what people, to this day, still call "The TCL war".

Source: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-04/msg00507.html

FWIW. Gronky (talk) 22:51, 19 April 2010 (UTC)


 * And while we're at it, the History section is wrong in stating that "Guile had its origin in [...] the Tcl Wars". According to Tom Lord in that message and also in, work on Guile started long before the "Tcl Wars" incident. MagV (talk) 18:15, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

This is confirmed in the history section of the guile documentation. Guile was already under development as a way to externalize the functionality of Emacs Lisp to the rest of the GNU toolset. It was argued to Richard Stallman that Scheme was more powerful and flexible than Emacs Lisp and it should be possible to get Guile to interpret Emacs Lisp as well as standard Scheme. Richard agreed that this was worth pursuing, but did not announce the project publicly until the Tcl Wars. This led to the misconception that Guile was developed as an answer to the Tcl Wars. Stallman argued that Scheme was better suited for application integration and extension because he had already seen it in action. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Leeeoooooo (talk • contribs) 22:12, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

C-like syntax?
The article mentions translations of Guile, or of other scripting languages into Guile, for example


 * "a dialect of Scheme essentially differing only in its C-like syntax"

but cites no references.

Also, Stallman's original post in the Tcl Wars mentioned two scripting language projects: "One will be Lisp-like, and one will have a more traditional algebraic syntax." Did this project ever materialize? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Trashbird1240 (talk • contribs) 21:59, 20 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Not really, that idea didn't go very far so far; though the Scheme implementation has gotten very good, Emacs Lisp is also reaching completion I think, and while the JS and Lua implementations are not completed at all, they're there and if someone took the time and worked on them they could become completed and we'd have Lua and JS for that "traditional algebraic syntax." That being said, I'd encourage everyone to just learn Scheme, it's not hard at all, there's just lots of undeserved FUD and ignorance about Lisp nowadays. :)  There actually *was* some C-like alternative syntax that basically fully worked I think, but simply no one used it and it's probably depracated now, or maybe it can be digged out again and still be used.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.72.254.242 (talk) 13:18, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

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