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Guile’s two main advantages over its competition are these:

  Guile is easier to extend. Guile’s transparent support for garbage collection makes it easier to write reliable primitives that manipulate dynamically allocated objects than is possible in Python. Tcl’s older interface restricts the user to operating on strings, and Tcl’s newer interface requires the user to maintain reference counts; neither is an attractive choice.
  Guile supports translators. Unlike Tcl and Python, Guile offers users a choice of scripting languages. A user can configure and extend any Guile-based application using any language for which a translator exists.

4.8. Obtaining Guile and Other Packages

Guile and SCWM are still under active development. The examples in this chapter show interactions with the versions current in late 1997; subsequent versions may behave differently. Consult up-to-date documentation for details.

Guile is available via anonymous FTP on prep.ai.mit.edu in /pub/gnu; as of this writing, the most recent release is ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/guile-1.2.tar.gz. Nightly snapshots of the Guile development sources are also available; see the Unofficial Guile Home Page at http://www.red-bean.com/guile/ for details.

The SCWM home page is http://web.mit.edu/mstachow/www/scwm.html; it contains news and pointers to the most recent release.

The Tcl/Tk home page is http://www.tcltk.com/.

The Python home page is http://www.python.org/.


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