
Q eQuational Programming System Version 6.2
Copyright (c) 1991-2005 by Albert Graef
<ag@muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de, Dr.Graef@t-online.de>

The Q programming system is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.

The Q programming system is distributed in the hope that it will be
useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

(See the file "COPYING" included in the distribution for the GNU General
Public License.)


Author's address:

Albert Graef			Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz
Schmittpforte 11                Musikwissenschaftliches Institut
55599 Wonsheim/Germany          Bereich Musikinformatik
Dr.Graef@t-online.de		55099 Mainz/Germany
				ag@muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de

URL: http://www.musikwissenschaft.uni-mainz.de/~ag


ABOUT Q
===== =

Q is a powerful and extensible scripting language based on term rewriting
which offers advanced symbolic processing and functional programming
capabilities. Q's main features:

- SIMPLE: Programs are just collections of equations which are used to
  evaluate expressions in a symbolic fashion.

- POWERFUL: Despite its conceptual simplicity, Q is a full-featured functional
  programming language with a modern syntax, curried function applications,
  dynamic object-oriented typing, exception handling and POSIX style
  multithreading.

- EXTENSIBLE: Q has a libtool-based C interface which makes it easy to extend
  the interpreter with your own primitives. (As of version 6.0, SWIG, the
  "Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator" is now also supported, which
  makes it fairly easy to wrap complex C/C++ libraries in Q modules.)

- EMBEDDABLE: Q can also be embedded in C/C++ programs, in order to employ Q
  as a macro language or term rewriting engine in your applications.

- PORTABLE: Q runs on BeOS, FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows.
  Porting to other modern Unix-based platforms should be a piece of cake.

- FAST: Well, as an interpreted language Q is certainly not as fast as native
  machine code, but it has an efficient interpreter which byte-compiles
  scripts in an eye blink and executes them about as fast as interpreted Lisp
  or Haskell.

- EASY TO USE: Just throw together some equations, run the interpreter and
  start to evaluate expressions. A symbolic debugger is included. Q scripts
  can be run from the command line or within GNU Emacs. For Windows, a
  graphical IDE for editing and running Q scripts is also available.

- BATTERIES INCLUDED: Q comes with a comprehensive standard library (written
  in Q itself) which provides complex numbers, additional list processing
  functions, "streams" (a lazy variant of lists), container data structures
  (sets, dictionaries, etc.), the lambda calculus, and even a PostScript
  interface. The distribution also includes a system interface written in C
  and other add-on modules for interfacing to various third-party tools and
  libraries, which makes Q a powerful tool for scientific programming,
  computer music, multimedia, and other advanced applications.

The distribution includes the Q programming tools, the standard library, a
collection of useful add-on modules for interfacing to GNU Octave, GNU dbm,
ODBC, Curl, GGI, ImageMagick, Tcl/Tk, XML/XSLT and IBM's Data Explorer, as
well as the Q Apache module and Q language modes for Emacs and Kate. The Qpad
IDE for Windows can be obtained as a separate package. For more information
please check out the Q homepage at SourceForge:

	http://q-lang.sourceforge.net

GETTING Q
=========

As of December 2003, Q has become a SourceForge-hosted project, which can be
found at the following URL:

	http://sourceforge.net/projects/q-lang/

There you can obtain released source and binary packages, as well as the
latest and greatest development sources in CVS, under the following URLs.

Download area:

	http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=96881

CVS access:

	http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=96881

Note that to build Q from the cvs sources you will first have to run the
autogen.sh script which creates the configury. (You need autoconf, automake
and libtool to do this, see MAINTAINER'S NOTE below.) Then you proceed to
configure and compile the sources as explained under "INSTALLING FROM THE
SOURCES" below.

INSTALLATION
============

See the INSTALL file for generic (UNIX) installation instructions. This
version has been tested on FreeBSD, Linux and Windows, and should also work
(with minor tweaking) on most other modern UNIX/POSIX-based platforms. Please
report any patches required to build the package on other systems s.t. they
can be included in the next release.

Binary packages for Linux and Windows are available on the Q project website.
If you can contribute binaries for other systems please let me know.

INSTALLING FROM THE SOURCES
---------------------------

If you have a Bourne-compatible shell, a POSIX-compatible C library, and
either gcc (recommended) or another decent C compiler with ANSI C support,
chances are that you will be able to build this package from source without
too much hassle.

You'll need the GNU multiprecision library version 3.0 or later. If this
library is not available on your system, get it at http://www.swox.com/gmp/
and install it first.

As with other GNU autotools-based packages, the basic compile/install
procedure is as follows:

	./configure && make && make install

In this case configure picks a default set of optimization/debugging
flags. More aggressive optimization can make a great difference for execution
speed, though, so you might wish to use something like:

	CFLAGS=-O3 ./configure && make && make install

If all is well, this will install Q in the default location (/usr/local); you
can invoke the configure script with the --prefix option to change this. There
are a number of other configure options to play with; run configure with the
--help option for a list of the available options.

You can also run a simple test suite with:

	make test

This is by no means an exhaustive check of the interpreter's internals, but if
any of these tests fails then there's probably a portability bug that needs to
be fixed. You can also run this test before actually installing the software.

The same build process should also work on Cygwin, BeOS and Mac OS X. See also
the comments on specific systems below.

Documentation is available in texinfo format, from which you can create both
online and printed manuals in a variety of formats. The online manual in info
format will be installed on your system. Furthermore, additional README files
with information about the installed modules can be found in <prefix>/share/
q/etc.

[MAINTAINER'S NOTE: The current release was prepared using autoconf 2.59,
automake 1.9.1 and libtool 1.5.8. If necessary, you can always grab the Q cvs
sources and run autogen.sh to bootstrap the configury yourself. Note that you
only need these tools if you are building from cvs sources, or if you want to
work on the configure scripts and automake Makefiles.]

POST-INSTALL
------------

To complete the installation, you might wish to install Emacs Q mode. To these
ends, copy the q-mode.el file under <prefix>/share/q/etc to your Emacs
site-lisp directory (or any directory searched for elisp files), and set up
your .emacs file as described in Appendix E of the manual and at the beginning
of the q-mode.el file. In the etc directory you also find a syntax file to
enjoy Q syntax highlighting in the advanced KDE editor Kate. Just copy the
q.xml file into your kde/share/apps/katepart/syntax directory and you're
set. Moreover, a plugin which lets you run Q sessions in GNU TeXmacs, the free
scientific text editor (see http://www.texmacs.org), is available as a
separate tarball from the Q homepage.

If you want to install the Q Apache module, take a look at mod_q/README in the
sources and follow the instructions there.

TROUBLESHOOTING
---------------

When compiling from the sources, the most common problem probably is that
shared libraries and external modules refuse to build on your system. In this
case, you can disable dynamic modules altogether with the --disable-shared
configure option. This should work on *any* system supported by libtool, and
you will still be able to use the modules bundled with the Q distribution
since these will be linked directly into the interpreter.

If you *can* build the modules successfully, you may still encounter problems
loading them in the interpreter, due to bugs in libtool's dynamic module
loader, libltdl. In this case, if you have a custom libltdl on your system,
you can try to use that with the --with-installed-ltdl configure option. (Use
this option with care. If you do not have libltdl on your system or configure
cannot locate it, the bundled libltdl will be built and installed on your
system, which may cause problems with other libltdl-based applications.)

Moreover, recent libtool versions apparently have problems linking the Q
executable on some systems (I noticed this on FreeBSD 5.1 and Mac OS X
10.2.4). I think that this is a libtool bug; libtool versions <=1.4.2 did not
exhibit this behaviour. A workaround for this is to remove ltmain.sh and the
libltdl directory and rebuild the configury with the autogen.sh script (you
need to have a working autoconf/automake/libtool combo installed to do this).

Another potential obstacle is that the GNU readline library bundled with the Q
distribution, which the interpreter uses to provide advanced command line
editing features, refuses to compile. When this happens you can either disable
readline support with the --without-rl option, or make sure that you have a
readline library on your system, in which case configure uses the installed
library.

More generally, if configure fails to locate some required or optional
third-party libraries on your system, you can specify --with-PKG=LIBS and
--with-PKG-includes=INCLUDES to tell configure how to link these libraries
(-L, -l etc.), and which additional includes (-I) are required to access the
corresponding header files. Run configure --help to find out about the
optional libraries and corresponding --with options which are supported. Only
the gmp library is strictly necessary for building the package. Multithreading
support will be enabled by default if the POSIX thread library is found, but
can be disabled with the --without-pthread option.

For instance, if your gmp library is in /root/lib and the gmp.h header file in
/root/include, then you would configure with:
./configure --with-gmp="-L/root/lib -lgmp" --with-gmp-includes=-I/root/include

SYSTEM-SPECIFIC NOTES
=====================

BEOS
----

The bundled readline 4.2 won't compile, and the module loader in the stock
libltdl is broken. I suggest that you install the readline library from the
GeekGadgets package and the fixed libtool package, both available from
http://www.bebits.com. Then you can build the package with:

./configure --with-installed-ltdl

Otherwise you'll have to live without readline and dynamic loader support, and
you should configure as follows:

./configure --without-rl --disable-shared

Note that currently there's no multithreading support, as there's no pthread
library for BeOS. Also, BeOS support is pretty much in limbo since I don't run
BeOS any more, and probably won't until one of the free replacements really
takes off.

CYGWIN
------

Last time I checked, dynamic modules failed to compile properly, and Cygwin's
pthread support was lacking, so you might have to build with --disable-shared
and --without-pthread. Cygwin has since advanced quite a bit so these problems
might have gone away with the newer versions.

FREEBSD
-------

(As of version 4.3.2, tested on FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE. The same build procedure
might work on the other BSDs as well, but I have not tested this.)

Make sure you have a recent gmp library, as well as the libraries for the
modules that you want (gdbm, odbc, tk, etc., all available in the ports
tree). You'll also have to specify some compilation flags to enable the
compiler to find things in /usr/local. If you want multithreading, add
--with-pthread=-lc_r to the configure command. (Recent FreeBSD versions might
now include a "real" pthread library, in this case you can omit this flag.)

Sample configure command (omit the Tcl/Tk include paths and --with-tk option
if you don't need the tk module):

CFLAGS="-O3 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/tcl8.4 \
-I/usr/local/include/tk8.4 -L/usr/local/lib" \
./configure --with-tk="-ltcl84 -ltk84" --with-pthread=-lc_r

LIBTOOL TROUBLES: The distribution is now based on libtool 1.5.8, which gives
me trouble when linking the Q main executable (apparently the -lc_r flag is
not passed to the linker). If this happens to you, try removing ltmain.sh and
libltdl from the main source directory, run autogen.sh to rebuild the
configury (you need to have autoconf/automake/libtool installed to do this)
and try again.

LINUX
-----

Linux is the primary development platform for this software, and the sources
should build out of the box on all recent Linux distributions. RPM packages
for some popular Linux distributions are available on the Q project website.

On Linux (as well as other systems having an ISO C99-compliant printf function
which supports the %a conversion flag) you can add -DHAVE_ISO99_PRINTF to the
list of compilation flags. This will enable some special code in the `save'
and `load' commands which allows saved floating point values always to be
reconstructed exactly, without any rounding errors. To get this, configure
with `CFLAGS=-DHAVE_ISO99_PRINTF ./configure'.

MAC OS X
--- -- -

As of version 4.2, the sources can be compiled with the gcc 3.1 from the Mac
OS X development pack (10.2.4 has been tested, YMMV). The preprocessor of this
gcc version seems to be broken, but this can be worked around using gcc's
-no-cpp-precomp option. Configure as follows (using bash):

CFLAGS=-no-cpp-precomp ./configure --prefix=/usr

Another libtool-related trouble reported by various OS X users: If you get an
error when building the clib module, try the following: In modules/clib/
Makefile.am, uncomment the 1st LIBADD line (line 11) and comment out the
second one (line 12). Then run automake (or the autogen script; you need to
have autoconf/automake/libtool installed to do this) and try
again. (Apparently you need to do this from a fresh source tree.)

More libtool quirks: If you still get errors when linking the Q main
executable, try rebuilding the configury from scratch as described in
TROUBLESHOOTING above.

NOTE: Q-Tk applications currently require that you have an X11-based Tcl/Tk
installed and must be run in an X server, which is available from
http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/. Actually it should also be possible to build
an X-less version which uses the native (Aqua) Tcl/Tk, but I haven't figured
out how to do this yet; any input on this will be appreciated.

To get an X11 version of Tcl/Tk running on your system, you'll have to install
Tcl/Tk from source. First install the X11 server so that the necessary X11
libraries are available. Then get the Tcl/Tk 8.4 sources from
http://www.tcl.tk and follow the instructions for Unix installation. (*Don't*
use the OS X installation procedure, otherwise you will get the Aqua version.)

SOLARIS
-------

The sources should compile cleanly with gcc (versions up to 4.3.1 have been
tested with gcc 2.95.2 under Solaris 2.8/x86). Configure as follows:

./configure --with-pthread="-lpthread -lrt"

The -lrt option (-lposix4 on older Solaris systems) is needed to get the
semaphore functions, if you're building with pthread support.

WINDOWS
-------

A binary release for all current 32 bit Windows systems, the Qpad package, is
available from the Q project website. It provides an MSI installer package, a
user-friendly Windows GUI frontend to the interpreter, extensive online
documentation including the full Q language manual in html help format, and of
course precompiled binaries of the Q programming tools, libraries and modules.

All required libraries and other support files are included in this package,
except ImageMagick and Tcl/Tk, which you will have to install separately if
you want to use the corresponding modules. You can find Windows installers for
these libraries at the following URLs:

- ImageMagick: http://www.imagemagick.org/www/archives.html

- Tcl/Tk: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActiveTcl/

If you would like to use q-mode.el under Windows, you should get a Win32
version of Emacs which supports processes (and hence comint). Two nice Windows
ports of Emacs are NT Emacs (see http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/
ntemacs.html) and XEmacs (http://www.xemacs.org). After installing Qpad, you
can find q-mode.el in Qpad\etc under your program files directory. Copy this
file to your Emacs site-lisp directory, and set up your .emacs file as
described in Appendix E of the manual.

If you want to build the native Windows port yourself, you need a recent
version of Mingw and Msys, both available at http://www.mingw.org. To build
the entire distribution, you'll also need MS Visual C/C++ and a bunch of
additional libraries. To ease porting, the Q project website has a zip file
with the complete build tree used to create the current Windows release,
including the Qpad sources, the add-on modules, and all dependencies except
ImageMagick and Tcl/Tk.

OPTIONAL SOFTWARE
======== ========

The Q distribution comes with some add-on modules which can be found in the
`modules' directory of the Q source tree. (Other add-on modules are
distributed separately; please check the Q homepage for more information about
these.) `Clib', Q's "system" module which provides access to some important
functions from the C library, is now an integrated part of the standard
library, and is documented in the Q language manual. Some other modules are
provided to access various useful third-party software. Currently the
following optional software can be used with Q:

APACHE
------

A Q module for the Apache web server (http://www.apache.org/) can be found in
the mod_q subdirectory of the sources. See the mod_q/README file for details.

CURL
----

The `curl' module gives access to libcurl (http://curl.haxx.se/), a powerful
library for transferring files with URL syntax which supports all common
Internet protocols. See README-Curl for more information.

GDBM
----

Q's `gdbm' module provides an interface to the GNU dbm library, see gdbm(3).
If you have a Linux system then most likely you already have this library,
otherwise you can get it from http://www.gnu.org or one of its mirrors. This
module is also supported on FreeBSD, OS X and Windows. See README-Gdbm for
more information.

GGI
---

The `ggi' module provides access to the GGI (General Graphics Interface)
library, available from http://www.ggi-project.org. This module allows you to
create raster graphics on a variety of display devices. See README-GGI for
more information.

Please note that GGI itself doesn't provide any custom font support for text
rendering, but Q's `ggi' module does. To make this work, you'll also need
version 2 of the FreeType library, available from http://www.freetype.org/.

GHOSTSCRIPT
-----------

Q provides access to PostScript graphics via the `graphics' script contained
in the standard library. This script also provides an interface to
Ghostscript, a PostScript previewer which is available for a great variety of
systems and can be obtained from http://www.ghostscript.com.

IMAGEMAGICK
-----------

The `magick' module lets you access most common image formats using the
ImageMagick library, available from http://www.imagemagick.org. Using this
module you can also, e.g., perform various image manipulation operations and
render image files in a GGI visual. See README-Magick for more information.

OCTAVE
------

The `octave' module provides access to John W. Eaton's Octave, a comprehensive
MATLAB-like software for performing advanced numeric computations. To use this
module, you must have Octave installed on your system, which is available from
http://www.octave.org. You can also find some additional items including
information about binary packages for Windows at the GNU Octave Repository
(http://octave.sourceforge.net/). See README-Octave for more information.

ODBC
----

ODBC has become the industry standard for portable and vendor independent
database access. Q's ODBC interface lets you connect to ODBC-compatible
databases and retrieve or modify data using SQL statements. To use this
module, you need an ODBC driver manager on your system, as well as the
database and corresponding ODBC driver you want to use. Two well-known open
source ODBC implementations are iODBC (http://www.iodbc.org/) and unixODBC
(http://www.unixodbc.org/). Two popular ODBC-compatible open source databases
are MySQL (http://www.mysql.com/) and PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org/).
Under Windows you can also connect to various proprietary databases such as MS
Access. See README-ODBC for more information.

OPENDX
------

The `dxl' ("DX-Link") module provides an interface to IBM's Open Data
Explorer, a powerful scientific data visualization software. This software
needs Motif, and is only available for Unix and Linux systems at this
time. (At least there is no straightforward way to make it run on other
systems.) You can get it at http://www.opendx.org. See README-DXL for more
information.

SWIG
----

SWIG is the "Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator" which allows you to
create C/C++ wrapper modules for various target languages in an easy way. More
information about SWIG can be found at http://www.swig.org.

SWIG support is an important new feature which has been added in version 6.0
of the Q programming system. While a hand-crafted interface module allows you
to tailor the interface to the Q environment, creating such a module by hand
is often impractical for huge C/C++ libraries such as GUI toolkits. This is
where SWIG comes in handy. SWIG makes it really easy to wrap big libraries
since the wrappers are generated automatically from simple interface
definition files.

Note that until the Q-SWIG module becomes part of the official SWIG
distribution, to use SWIG with Q you'll need a SWIG version which has been
patched up to add support for the Q language. For the time being, a suitable
SWIG package can be found on the Q homepage.

TCL/TK
------

The `tk' module provides an interface to Tcl/Tk, John Ousterhout's command
language and graphical user interface toolkit. Using the `tk' module, you can
employ Tcl/Tk to create high-quality graphical user interfaces which are
portable across most popular operating systems and windowing environments,
including Unix/X11, Mac OS and MS Windows. See README-Tk for more information.

XML/XSLT
--------

XML (Extensible Markup Language, http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml) and XSLT (XML
Stylesheet Language Transformations, http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt) are open
standards by the W3C consortium. XML is used to represent structured data,
XSLT to transform that data into other XML-based formats. XML is commonly
employed to represent complex structured data in a way which facilitates data
exchange across various applications and systems, while XSLT helps to present
such structured data in any manner desired, e.g., as an HTML file. Q provides
an interface to XML and XSLT via its `xml' module, which is implemented using
the libxml2 and libxslt libraries from the GNOME project (http://xmlsoft.org).

FEEDBACK
========

This software is provided free of charge and without any warranty, but that
does *not* mean that I'm not fixing bugs or listening to new ideas. ;-) So
your questions, comments, suggestions, contributions and, in particular, bug
reports and patches are always welcome. I'd also like to hear about your
experiences using Q, and which applications you use it for.

To these ends, the SourceForge project website provides an area where you can
post bug reports and patches, as well as support and feature requests.
Moreover, the site also offers two mailing lists for discussing Q development
and usage.


Enjoy!

July 2005  Albert Graef
