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Many interesting comments have been made on this subject. I hope Jim Blandy and others are not discouraged by them. I agree that some parts are a mess. The documentation needs updated as soon as possible. Without good docs, you have to really want to use Guile to work with it. This will scare off the casual programmer that is looking for an extension language. Why am I using Guile? I believe that Scheme is by far too good of a language to go to waste. It just kills me to see so many concurrent Scheme developers working on separate projects - SCSH, MzScheme, RScheme, STk, SIOD, ELK, and Guile to name a few. It must be due to the nature of Lispy programmers, you don't see a half-dozen PERL or TCL variants being concurrently developed. Oh yes, I realize that is the point of RxRS, to unify the dialect. The problem is, RxRS is only suitable for teaching programming concepts and trivial "guess the animal" programs. As soon as a Scheme dialect is extended to do something *useful* it becomes incompatible with practicaly every other Scheme in existence. This is not a rant. I dearly want to see Scheme succeed as a scripting/ extension language. I also want to se it succeed as a stand alone programming language. I have written many mission critical PERL programs just because there was nothing more elegant to use (I simply refuse to use TCL). I feel that in order for a language to be really useful for scripting, extension, *and* development it needs: 1. Minimal startup time. Yes, I know you can reduce Guile's startup time by various hacks. It *needs* to be fast right out the box. 2. Minimal core. Everything other than basic functionality needs to be a module. 3. Drop dead simple networking (a module). Guile more or less does this already, except that it needs to be a module and recv! needs supplemented in some way. 4. Drop dead simple GUI (a module). Like STk. I know GUI isn't important to everyone. Add it to the above features and you have a language that can compete in the Real World with PERL and TCL. These are my perceptions of the matter, yours will probably be different. -Dave -- David Tillman | Sparrow Information Systems dtillman@sparrowsys.com | Contract C and PERL programming