Introduction

This document describes how to install and use MIT/GNU Scheme, the UnCommon Lisp. It gives installation instructions for all of the platforms that we support; complete documentation of the command-line options and environment variables that control how Scheme works; and rudimentary descriptions of how to interact with the evaluator, compile and debug programs, and use the editor. The release notes are included as an appendix.

This document discusses many operating-system specific features of the MIT/GNU Scheme implementation. In order to simplify the discussion, we use abbreviations to refer to some operating systems. When the text uses the term unix, this means any of the unix systems that we support, including GNU/Linux and the BSD variants. We use the term Windows to collectively refer to the modern Microsoft Windows 32-bit operating systems: Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. We use the term PC to refer to any computer running Windows. Thus we consider a PC to be a system with a DOS-like file system, using backslashes for directory separators, drive letters, cr-lf line termination, and (potentially) the hideous 8.3 short filenames.

The primary distribution site for this software is

     http://www.gnu.org/mit-scheme/

Although our software is distributed from other sites and in other media, the complete distribution and the most recent release is always available at our site.

To report bugs, use the bug-reporting tool at

     http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/mit-scheme/

Please include the output of the identify-world procedure (see Basics of Starting Scheme), so we know what version of the system you are using.