What is Guile?

[Ricard Mira]

Some time ago, I participated in the discussion about the
reorganization of the Guile documentation.  I have been thinking about
this and discussing via private email with Max Techter (who had
proposed to apply domain analysis).  My conclusion is that we must
understand Guile better before trying to reorganize its documentation.

So my strategy would be to prepare something like a domain dictionary
(which is a part of domain analysis) but integrated into the
documentation (to avoid wasted work).  We could achieve that by
improving the definitions of important things, starting with the
definition of Guile itself.

The "What is Guile?" node in the Guile Reference Manual contains the
main definition of Guile.  I would like to make it more structured,
because I think it is very important for the definition of Guile to
explain its fundamental features in an easily understandable way.
Later on, we could improve (or create) definitions for other important
things, and put them into subnodes.

Here is my proposal:

---------

What is Guile?

Guile is the GNU *multi-lingual extensibility interpreter*.  The goal
of the Guile project is to give users a choice of extension language.

Basically, Guile is an *interpreter* that implements the powerful yet
simple Scheme programming language adding many practical features to
it.  Further, it is the GNU standard for *extensibility*: we provide
it as a C library which developers can easily incorporate into C
programs running on the GNU system, so that users can extend all those
programs in a similar way.  But above all, we plan to make Guile a
*multi-lingual* environment, which will allow users to extend programs
using their favorite extension languages.

* Menu:

* Scheme Interpreter::
* Extensibility Standard::
* Multi-lingual Environment::