Guile 1.3.2 released

[Mikael Djurfeldt <mdj@mdj-pc.nada.kth.se>]

[I'm releasing Guile-1.3.2 on behalf of the Guile maintainer Jim Blandy]

Version 1.3.2 of Guile is now available via anonymous FTP from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/guile/guile-1.3.2.tar.gz.

Guile is a portable, embeddable Scheme implementation written in C.
Guile provides a machine independent execution platform that can be
linked in as a library when building extensible programs.

The mailing list `guile@sourceware.cygnus.com' carries discussions,
questions, and often answers, about Guile.  To subscribe, send mail to
guile-subscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com.  Of course, please send bug
reports (and fixes!) to bug-guile@gnu.org.  Note that one address is
@sourceware.cygnus.com, and the other is at @gnu.org.

This release contains many bug fixes and incremental improvements.
In particular:
- The C API has been revised in many places, based on input from
  users.
- The I/O subsystem has been rewritten and the C level interface for
  implementing port types as changed.  The new system is based on
  shared access to buffers.
- New builtin efficient sorting functions.
- New builtin random number support.
- `format' for pretty-printing has been added.
- Guile now supports optional arguments to procedures and macros.
- Dybvig-style guardians for managing objects that have been
  collected.

For further details, see NEWS, in the distribution.

Thanks ===============================================================

The Guile developers would like to thank the following people for
their contributions to this release of Guile:

The Guile core distribution:

Greg Badros contributes patches to use the new SMOB interface.
Gary Houston contributed a more efficient and portable implementation of
    I/O ports, and hacked on (ice-9 expect).
Michael Livshin implemented Dybvig's Guardians.
Roland Orre contributed list and vector sorting functions.
Russ McManus contributed a command-line argument parser (ice-9 getopt-long).
Ken Raeburn contributed patches to make Guile use `const' in some
    appropriate places.
Greg Harvey made sure Jim didn't lose any patches, and made readline
    highlight matching parenthesis.

Bug reports and fixes from:

  Greg Badros, Etienne Bernard, John Bley, Brad Bowman, Frank Cieslok,
  Karl Eichwalder, Mark Elbrecht, Jay Glascoe, Ian Grant, Eric Hanchrow,
  Greg Harvey, Dirk Herrmann, Johannes Hjorth, Charbel Jacquin, David
  Kaelbling, Lorentey Karoly, Valdis Kletnieks, Brad Knotwell, Michael
  Livshin, David Lutterkort, Christian Lynbech, Russ McManus, Eric
  Moore, Nicolas Neuss, Thien-Thi Nguyen, James Dean Palmer, Richard
  Polton, Ken Raeburn, Mikael Ståldal, Telford Tendys, Jon Trowbridge,
  Bernard Urban, Sebastien Villemot, and Jim Wilson

Also, thanks to:
- Craig Brozefsky, for his work on the Guile mailing list web archives
- Pat Eyler, for his continuing work on the Guile web pages

Apologies to any we've forgotten.


About This Distribution ==============================================

Building and installing this distribution gives you:
guile --- a stand-alone interpreter for Guile, usually installed in
	/usr/local/bin.  With no arguments, this is a simple
	interactive Scheme interpreter.  It can also be used as an
	interpreter for script files; see the NEWS file for details.
guile-config --- a Guile script which provides the information necessary
	to link your programs against the Guile library.
guile-snarf --- a script to parse declarations in your C code for
	Scheme-visible C functions, Scheme objects to be used by C code, etc.
libguile.a --- an object library containing the Guile interpreter,
	usually installed in /usr/local/lib.  You can use Guile in
	your own programs by linking against this.
libqthreads.a --- an object library containing the QuickThreads
	primitives.  If you enabled thread support when you configured
	Guile, you will need to link your code against this too.
<libguile.h>, <guile/gh.h>, <libguile/*.h> --- header files for
	libguile.a, usually installed in /usr/local/include.
ice-9, ice-9/*.scm --- run-time support for Guile: the module
	system, read-eval-print loop, some R4RS code and other
	infrastructure.  Usually installed in
	/usr/local/share/guile/<version>.
data-rep.info --- An essay on how to write C code that works with
	Guile Scheme values.

Interesting files include:
- INSTALL, which contains instructions on building and installing Guile.
- NEWS, which describes user-visible changes since the last release of Guile.
- COPYING, which describes the terms under which you may redistribute
  Guile, and explains that there is no warranty.

The Guile source tree is laid out as follows:

libguile:
	The Guile Scheme interpreter --- both the object library
	for you to link with your programs, and the executable you can run.
ice-9:  Guile's module system, initialization code, and other infrastructure.
guile-config:
	Source for the guile-config script.
qt: 	A cooperative threads package from the University of Washington,
	which Guile can use.  If you configure Guile with the
        --with-threads flag, you will need to link against the -lqt
        library, found in this directory.  Qt is under a separate
        copyright; see `qt/README' for more details.
doc:	Some preliminary documentation for Guile.  The real Guile
	manual is incomplete, and is currently being revised.
doc/example-smob: Sample code, discussed in the preliminary
	documentation above, for a program that extends Guile with a
	new data type, and functions that operate on it.


Anonymous CVS Access and FTP snapshots ===============================

We make the developers' working Guile sources available via anonymous
CVS, and by nightly snapshots, accessible via FTP.  See the files
`ANON-CVS' and `SNAPSHOTS' for details.

If you would like to receive mail when people commit changes to the
Guile CVS repository, you can subscribe to guile-cvs@sourceware.cygnus.com
by sending a message to guile-cvs-subscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com.  Even
better, you can get daily digests of these commit messages by sending
a message to guile-cvs-digest-subscribe@sourceware.cygnus.com.

If you want to subscribe an e-mail address other than the one that
appears in your From: header, say foo@bar.com, send a mail note to
guile-cvs-subscribe-foo=bar.com@sourceware.cygnus.com.


Hacking It Yourself ==================================================

As distributed, Guile needs only an ANSI C compiler and a Unix system
to compile.  However, Guile's makefiles, configuration scripts, and a
few other files are automatically generated, not written by hand.  If
you want to make changes to the system (which we encourage!) you will
find it helpful to have the tools we use to develop Guile.  They
are the following:

Autoconf 2.13 --- a system for automatically generating `configure'
	scripts from templates which list the non-portable features a
	program would like to use.  Available in
	"ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/autoconf"

Automake 1.4 --- a system for automatically generating Makefiles that
	conform to the (rather Byzantine) GNU coding standards.  The
	nice thing is that it takes care of hairy targets like 'make
	dist' and 'make distclean', and automatically generates
	Makefile dependencies.  Automake is available in
	"ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/automake"

	Before using automake, you may need to copy `threads.m4' and
	`guile.m4' from the top directory of the Guile core disty to
	`/usr/local/share/aclocal.

libtool 1.3.3 --- a system for managing the zillion hairy options needed
	on various systems to produce shared libraries.  Available in
	"ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libtool"

You are lost in a little maze of automatically generated files, all
different.
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