[[tags: manual]]

== Getting started 

Chicken is a compiler that translates Scheme source files into
C, which in turn can be fed to a C compiler to generate a
standalone executable.  An interpreter is also available and can be
used as a scripting environment or for testing programs before
compilation.

This chapter is designed to get you started with Chicken programming,
describing what it is and what it will do for you, and covering basic
use of the system. With almost everything discussed here, there is
more to the story, which the remainder of the manual reveals. Here, we
only cover enough to get you started. Nonetheless, someone who knows
Scheme already should be able to use this chapter as the basis for
writing and running small Chicken programs. 

=== Scheme

Scheme is a member of the Lisp family of languages, of which Common
Lisp and Emacs Lisp are the other two widely-known members. As with
Lisp dialects, Scheme features

* a wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and object-oriented
* a very simple syntax, based upon nested parenthesization 
* the ability to extend the language in meaningful and useful ways

In contrast to Common Lisp, Scheme is very minimal, and tries to
include only those features absolutely necessary in programming. In
contrast to Emacs Lisp, Scheme is not anchored into any one program
(Emacs), and has a somewhat more modern language design. 

Scheme is defined in a document called ''The Revised^5 Report on the
Algorithmic Language Scheme'', or ''R5RS'' for short. (Yes, it really
has been revised five times, so an expanded version of its name would
be ''The Revised Revised Revised Revised Revised Report''.)  A newer
report, ''R6RS'', was 
released in 2007, but this report has attracted considerable
controversy, and not all Scheme implementations will be made compliant
with it. Chicken essentially complies with R5RS. 

Even though Scheme is consciously minimalist, it is recognized that a
language must be more than a minimal core in order to be
useful. Accordingly, the Scheme community uses a process known as
`Scheme Requests For Implementation' (SRFI, pronounced `SUR-fee') to
define new language features. A typical Scheme system therefore
complies with one of the Scheme reports plus some or all of the
accepted SRFIs. 

A good starting point for Scheme knowledge is
[[http://www.schemers.org]]. There you will find the defining reports,
FAQs, lists of useful books and other resources, and the SRFIs. 

The Chicken community is at present developing tutorials for
programmers who are new to Scheme but experienced with Python, Ruby,
or other languages. These can be found on the Chicken wiki. 

=== Chicken

Chicken is an implementation of Scheme that has many advantages.

<blockquote>
Chicken Scheme combines an optimising compiler with a reasonably fast
interpreter.  It supports almost all of R5RS and the important SRFIs.
The compiler generates portable C code that supports tail recursion,
first-class continuations, and lightweight threads, and the interface to
and from C libraries is flexible, efficient, and easy to use.  There are
hundreds of contributed Chicken libraries that make the programmer's
task easier.  The interpreter allows interactive use, fast prototyping,
debugging, and scripting.  The active and helpful Chicken community
fixes bugs and provides support.  Extensive documentation is supplied.
</blockquote>

Chicken was developed by Felix L. Winkelmann over the period from 2000
through 2007. In early 2008, Felix
asked the community to take over the responsibility of developing and
maintaining the system, though he still takes a strong interest in it,
and participates actively. 

Chicken includes 

* a Scheme interpreter that supports almost all of  R5RS Scheme, with
  only a few relatively minor omissions, and with many extensions
* a compatible compiler whose target is C, thus making porting to new
  machines and architectures relatively straightforward
** the C support allows Scheme code to include `embedded' C code,
  thus making it relatively easy to invoke host OS or library
  functions
* a framework for language extensions, library modules that broaden
  the functionality of the system

This package is distributed under the '''BSD license''' and as such is free
to use and modify.

Scheme cognoscenti will appreciate the method of compilation and the
design of the runtime-system, which follow closely Henry Baker's
[[http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html|CONS Should Not
CONS Its Arguments, Part II: Cheney on the M.T.A.]] paper and expose a
number of interesting properties.

* Consing (creation of data on the heap) is relatively inexpensive,
  because a generational garbage collection scheme is used, in which
  short-lived data structures are reclaimed extremely quickly.

* Moreover, {{call-with-current-continuation}} is practically for free
  and Chicken does not suffer under any performance penalties if
  first-class continuations are used in complex ways.

The generated C code is fully tail-recursive.

Some of the features supported by Chicken:

* SRFIs 0, 1, 2, 4, 6-19, 23, 25-31, 37-40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 55, 57,
  60-63, 66, 69, 72, 78, 85, 95 and 98.
* Lightweight threads based on first-class continuations
* Pattern matching with Andrew Wright's {{match}} package
* Record structures
* Extended comment- and string-literal syntaxes
* Libraries for regular expressions, string handling
* UNIX system calls and extended data structures
* Create interpreted or compiled shell scripts written in Scheme for
  UNIX or Windows 
* Compiled C files can be easily distributed
* Allows the creation of fully self-contained statically linked executables
* On systems that support it, compiled code can be loaded dynamically

Chicken has been used in many environments ranging from embedded
systems through desktop machines to large-scale server deployments.  
The number of language extensions, or '''eggs''', is constantly growing.

* extended language features
* development tools, such as documentation generators, debugging, and
  automated testing libraries
* interfaces to other languages such as Java, Python, and Objective-C
* interfaces to database systems, GUIs, and other large-scale
  libraries, 
* network applications, such as servers and clients for ftp,
  smtp/pop3, irc, and http  
* web servers and related tools, including URL parsing, HTML
  generation, AJAX, and HTTP session management
* data formats, including XML, JSON, and Unicode support

Chicken is supported by SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface
Generator), a tool that produces quick-and-dirty interface modules
for C libraries ([[http://www.swig.org]]). 

This chapter provides you with an overview of the entire system, with
enough information to get started writing and running small Scheme
programs. Subsequent chapters cover

* [[Basic mode of operation]]: Compiling Scheme files.

* [[Using the compiler]]: Explains how to use Chicken to compile
  programs and execute them.

* [[Using the interpreter]]: Invocation and usage of {{csi}}, the
  Chicken interpreter

* [[Supported language]]: The language implemented by Chicken
  (deviations from the standard and extensions).

* [[Interface to external functions and variables]]: Accessing C and
  C++ code and data.

* [[Extensions]]: Packaging and installing extension libraries.

* [[Data representation]]: How Scheme data is internally represented.

* [[Bugs and limitations]]: Yes, there are some.

* [[FAQ]]: A list of Frequently Asked Questions about Chicken (and
  their answers!).

* [[Acknowledgements]]: A list of some of the people that have
  contributed to make Chicken what it is.

* [[Bibliography]]: Links to documents that may be of interest.

=== Chicken repositories, websites, and community

At present, the URLs for Chicken information and download are somewhat
confusing. It is envisaged that everything will eventually be
accessible via the 
domain {{chicken-scheme.org}}, but this hasn't been completely done. 

At present, the master Chicken website is
[[http://www.call-with-current-continuation.org]]. Here you can find
basic information about Chicken, downloads, and pointers to other key
resources. 

The Chicken wiki ([[http://chicken.wiki.br]]) contains the most
current version of the User's manual, along with various tutorials and
other useful documents. The list of eggs is at
[[http://chicken.wiki.br/Eggs%20Unlimited]].

A very useful search facility for questions about Chicken is found at
[[http://www.callcc.org]]. The Chicken issue tracker is at
[[http://www.irp.oist.jp/trac/chicken/wiki]].

The Chicken community has two major mailing lists. If you are a
Chicken user, {{Chicken-Users}}
([[http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users]]) will be
of interest. The crew working on the Chicken system itself uses the
very low-volume {{Chicken-Hackers}} list
([[http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-hackers]]) for
communication.  

=== Installing Chicken

Chicken is available in binary form for Windows and Linux/x86
systems, and in source form for all other platforms. Refer to the
{{README}} file in the distribution for instructions on installing it
on your system. 

Because it compiles to C, Chicken requires that a C compiler be
installed on your system. (If you're not writing embedded C code, you
can pretty much ignore the C compiler once you have installed it.) 

* On a Linux system, the GNU Compiler Collection ({{gcc}}) should be
  installed as part of the basic operating system, or should be
  available through the package management system (e.g., APT,
  Synaptic, RPM, or Yum, depending upon your Linux distribution).
* On Macintosh OS X, you will need the XCode tools, which are shipped
  on the OS X DVD with recent versions of the operating system.
* On Windows, you have three choices.
** Cygwin ([[http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin]]) provides a relatively
  full-featured Unix environment for Windows.  Chicken works
  substantially the same in Cygwin and Unix. 
** The GNU Compiler Collection has been ported to Windows, in the
  MinGW system ([[http://mingw.sourceforge.net]]). Unlike Cygwin,
  executables produced with MinGW do not need the Cygwin DLLs in order
  to run.   MSys is a companion package to MinGW; it provides a minimum
  Unix-style development/build environment, again ported from free
  software.
*** You can build Chicken either with MinGW alone or with MinGW plus 
  MSys. Both approaches produce a Chicken built against the mingw headers 
  and import libraries.
  The only difference is the environment where you actually run make.
  {{Makefile.mingw}} is can be used in {{cmd.exe}} with the version of make
  that comes with mingw.  {{Makefile.mingw-msys}} 
  uses unix commands such as {{cp}} and {{rm}}.  The end product is the
  same.

Refer to the {{README}} file for the version you're installing for
more information on the installation process. 

=== Development environments

The simplest development environment is a text editor and terminal
window (Windows: Command Prompt, OSX: Terminal, Linux/Unix: xterm) for
using the interpreter and/or calling the compiler. If you
[[/egg/readline|install the {{readline}} egg]], you
have all the benefits of command history in the interpreter, Emacs or
vi-compatible line editing, and customization.

You will need a text editor that knows Scheme; it's just too painful
with editors that don't do parenthesis matching and proper
indentation. Some editors allow you to execute Scheme code directly in
the editor. This makes programming very interactive: you can type in a
function and then try it right away. This feature is very highly
recommended. 

As programmers have very specific tastes about editors, the editors
listed here are shown in alphabetic order. We aren't about to tell you
which editor to use, and there may be editors not shown here that
might satisfy your needs. We would be very interested in reports of
other editors that have been used with Chicken, especially those that
support interactive evaluation of forms during editing. Pointers to
these (and to any editor customization files appropriate) should be
put on the Chicken wiki, and will likely be added to future editions
of this manual. (We have had a request for editors that support
proportional fonts, in particular.) 

* Emacs ([[http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs]]) is an
extensible, customizable, self-documenting editor available for
Linux/Unix, Macintosh, and Windows systems; See
[[/emacs]] for more information about the available options. 

* Epsilon ([[http://www.lugaru.com]]) is a commercial (proprietary) text
editor whose design was inspired by Emacs. Although Scheme support
isn't provided, a Lisp mode is available on Lugaru's FTP site, and
could with some work be made to duplicate the Emacs support.  

* SciTE ([[http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTE.html]]), 
unlike Emacs or Vim, follows typical graphical UI design conventions
and control-key mappings, and for simple tasks is as familiar and
easy to use as Notepad, KEdit, TeachText etc.  However it has many
programming features such as multiple open files, syntax
highlighting for a large number of languages (including Lisps),
matching of brackets, ability to fold sections of code based on the
matched brackets, column selections, comment/uncomment, and the
ability to run commands in the same directory as the current file
(such as make, grep, etc.)  SciTE is written with the GTK toolkit
and is portable to any GTK platform, including Windows, Linux and
MacOS.  It uses the Scintilla text-editing component, which lends
itself well to embedding within other IDEs and graphical toolkits.
It does not have any other Scheme-specific features, but being
open-source and modular, features like auto-formatting of
S-expressions could be added.  The syntax highlighting can be
configured to use different fonts for different types of syntax,
including proportional fonts. 

* Vim ([[http://www.vim.org]]) is a highly configurable text
editor built to enable efficient and fast text editing. It is an
improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX
systems. Vim comes with generic Lisp (and therefore Scheme) editing
capabilities out of the
box. A few tips on using Vim with Chicken can be found at 
[[http://cybertiggyr.com/gene/15-vim/]]. 

In the rest of this chapter, we'll assume that you are using an editor
of your choice and a regular terminal window for executing your
Chicken code. 

=== The Read-Eval-Print loop

To invoke the Chicken interpreter, you use the {{csi}} command. 

 $ csi
 CHICKEN
 (c)2008 The Chicken Team
 (c)2000-2007 Felix L. Winkelmann
 Version 3.1.2 - macosx-unix-gnu-x86	[ manyargs dload ptables applyhook ]
 SVN rev. 10185	compiled 2008-03-27 on argyre.local (Darwin)
 #;1>

This brings up a brief banner, and then the prompt. You can use this
pretty much like any other Scheme system, e.g., 

 #;1> (define (twice f) (lambda (x) (f (f x))))
 #;2> ((twice (lambda (n) (* n 10))) 3)
 300

Suppose  we have already created a file {{fact.scm}} containing a 
function definition. 

 (define (fact n)
   (if (= n 0)
       1
       (* n (fact (- n 1)))))

We can now load this file and try out the function. 

 #;3> (load "fact.scm")
 ; loading fact.scm ...
 #;4> (fact 3)
 6

The '''read-eval-print loop''' ('''REPL''') is the component of the
Scheme system that ''reads'' a Scheme expression, ''eval''uates it,
and ''prints'' out the result. The REPL's prompt can be customized
(see the [[http:Using%20the%20interpreter|`Using the Interpreter']])
but the default prompt, showing the number of the form, is quite
convenient. 

The REPL also supports debugging commands: 
input lines beginning with a {{,}} (comma) are treated as special
commands. (See the [[Using the interpreter#Toplevel commands|full list]].) We can
'''trace''' {{fact}} to see how it works. 

 #;5> ,tr fact
 #;5> (fact 3)
 |(fact 3)
 | (fact 2)
 |  (fact 1)
 |   (fact 0)
 |   fact -> 1 
 |  fact -> 1 
 | fact -> 2 
 |fact -> 6 
 6

The command number didn't increment, because the {{tr}} command isn't
actually a Scheme ''form''. 

==== Scripts

You can use the interpreter to run a Scheme program from the command
line. Here we create a program that does a quick search-and-replace on
an input file; the arguments are a regular expression and a
replacement string.

 $ cat quickrep.dat
 xyzabcghi
 abxawxcgh
 foonly 
 $ csi -ss quickrep.scm <quickrep.dat 'a.*c' A
 xyzAghi
 Agh
 foonly 

The {{-ss}} option sets several options that work smoothly together to
execute a script. You can make the command directly executable from
the shell by inserting a `[[Using the interpreter#Writing Scheme scripts|shebang line]]' at the beginning of the
program.

{{regex}}, the regular expression library, is one of the libraries
included with Chicken. 

 (use regex) 
 (define (process-line line re rplc) 
   (string-substitute re rplc line 'all))
 (define (quickrep re rplc) 
   (let ((line (read-line)))
     (if (not (eof-object? line))
         (begin 
           (display (process-line line re rplc))
           (newline)
           (quickrep re rplc)))))
 ;;; Does a lousy job of error checking!
 (define (main args)
   (quickrep (regexp (car args)) (cadr args)))

The {{-ss}} option arranges to call a procedure named {{main}}, with
the command line arguments, packed in a list, as its arguments. (There
are a number of ways this program could be made more idiomatic Chicken
Scheme, see the rest of the manual for details.)

=== The compiler 

There are several reasons you might want to compile your code. 

* Compiled code executes substantially faster than interpreted
  code. 
* You might want to deploy an application onto machines where the
  users aren't expected to have Chicken installed: compiled
  applications can be self-contained. 

The Chicken compiler is provided as the command {{chicken}}, but in
almost all cases, you will want to use the {{csc}} command
instead. {{csc}} is a convenient driver that automates compiling
Scheme programs into C, compiling C code into object code, and linking
the results into an executable file. (Note: in a Windows environment
with Visual Studio, you may find that {{csc}} refers to Microsoft's
C# compiler. There are a number of ways of sorting this out, of which
the simplest is to rename one of the two tools, and/or to 
organize your {{PATH}} according to the task at hand.)

Compiled code can be intermixed with interpreted code on systems that
support dynamic loading, which includes modern versions of *BSD,
Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. 

We can compile our factorial function, producing a file named
{{fact.so}} (`shared object' in Linux-ese, the same file type is used
in OS X and Windows, rather than {{dylib}} or {{dll}}, respectively). 

 chicken$ csc -dynamic fact.scm
 chicken$ csi -quiet
 #;1> (load "fact.so")
 ; loading fact.so ...
 #;2> (fact 6)
 720

On any system, we can just compile a program directly into an
executable. Here's a program that tells you whether its argument is a
palindrome. 

 (define (palindrome? x)
   (define (check left right)
     (if (>= left right)
         #t
         (and (char=? (string-ref x left) (string-ref x right))
              (check (add1 left) (sub1 right)))))
   (check 0 (sub1 (string-length x))))
 (let ((arg (car (command-line-arguments))))
   (display 
    (string-append arg 
                   (if (palindrome? arg) 
                       " is a palindrome\n"
                       " isn't a palindrome\n"))))
  
We can compile this program using {{csc}}, creating an executable
named {{palindrome}}. 

 $ csc -o palindrome palindrome.scm
 $ ./palindrome level
 level is a palindrome
 $ ./palindrome liver
 liver isn't a palindrome

Chicken supports separate compilation, using some extensions to
Scheme. Let's divide our palindrome program into a library module
({{pal-proc.scm}}) and a client module ({{pal-user.scm}}). 

Here's the external library. We {{declare}} that {{pal-proc}} is a
`unit', which is the basis of separately-compiled modules in
Chicken. (Units deal with separate compilation, but don't involve
separated namespaces; namespaced module systems are available as
eggs.)

 ;;; Library pal-proc.scm
 (declare (unit pal-proc))
 (define (palindrome? x)
   (define (check left right)
     (if (>= left right)
         #t
         (and (char=? (string-ref x left) (string-ref x right))
              (check (add1 left) (sub1 right)))))
   (check 0 (sub1 (string-length x))))

Next we have some  client code that `uses' this separately-compiled
module.  

 ;;; Client pal-user.scm
 (declare (uses pal-proc))
 (let ((arg (car (command-line-arguments))))
   (display 
    (string-append arg 
                   (if (palindrome? arg) 
                       " is a palindrome\n"
                       " isn't a palindrome\n"))))

Now we can compile and link everything together. (We show the compile
and link operations separately, but they can of course be combined
into one command.) 

 $ csc -c pal-proc.scm
 $ csc -c pal-user.scm
 $ csc -o pal-separate pal-proc.o pal-user.o
 $ ./pal-separate level
 level is a palindrome

=== Installing an egg

Installing eggs is quite straightforward on systems that support
dynamic loading (again, that would include *BSD, Linux, Mac OS X,
Solaris, and Windows).  The command {{chicken-install}} will fetch an
egg from the master Chicken repository, and install it on your local
system.

In this example, we install the {{uri}} egg, for parsing Uniform
Resource Identifiers. The installation produces a lot of output, which
we have edited for space reasons.

 $ chicken-install uri

 The extension uri does not exist.
 Do you want to download it ? (yes/no/abort) [yes] yes
 downloading uri.egg from (www.call-with-current-continuation.org eggs/3 80) 
   gzip -d -c ../uri.egg | tar xf -
 .  /Users/vmanis/local/bin/csc -feature compiling-extension 
      -s -O2 -d1 uri.scm -o uri.so -check-imports -emit-exports uri.exports
 ... (lots of stuff elided)
 .  rm -fr /Users/vmanis/project/chicken/uri.egg

First, {{chicken-install}} asks us if we want to download the egg. It
then uncompresses the egg, compiles the code, and installs the egg in
the local Chicken repository. 

Now we can use our new egg. 

 #;1> (use uri)
 ; loading /Users/vmanis/local/lib/chicken/3/uri.so ...
 ; loading /Users/vmanis/local/lib/chicken/3/coerce-support.so ...
 ; loading /Users/vmanis/local/lib/chicken/3/misc-extn-list-support.so ...
 ; loading /Users/vmanis/local/lib/chicken/3/synch-support.so ...
 ; loading /Users/vmanis/local/lib/chicken/3/lookup-table.so ...
 ; loading /Users/vmanis/local/lib/chicken/3/misc-extn-control-support.so ...
 #;2> (uri-host (uri "http://www.foobar.org/blah"))
 "www.foobar.org"

=== Accessing C libraries 

Because Chicken compiles to C, and because a foreign function
interface is built into the compiler, interfacing to a C library is
quite straightforward. This means that nearly any facility available
on the host system is accessible from Chicken, with more or less
work. 

Let's create a simple C library, to demonstrate how this
works. Here we have a function that will compute and return the '''n'''th
Fibonacci number. (This isn't a particularly good use of C here,
because we could write this function just as easily in Scheme, but a
real example would take far too much space here.) 

 /* fib.c */
 int fib(int n) {
   int prev = 0, curr = 1;
   int next; 
   int i; 
   for (i = 0; i < n; i++) {
     next = prev + curr;
     prev = curr;
     curr = next; 
   }
   return curr;
 } 

Now we can call this function from Chicken. 

 ;;; fib-user.scm
 #>
   extern int fib(int n);
 <# 
 (define xfib (foreign-lambda int "fib" int))
 (do ((i 0 (+ i 1))) ((> i 10))
   (printf "~A " (xfib i)))
 (newline)

The syntax {{#>...<#}} allows you to include literal C (typically
external declarations) in your Chicken code. We access {{fib}} by
defining a {{foreign-lambda}} for it, in this case saying that the
function takes one integer argument (the {{int}} after the function
name), and that it returns an integer result (the {{int}} before.) Now we can invoke
{{xfib}} as though it were an ordinary Scheme function. 

 $ gcc -c fib.c
 $ csc -o fib-user fib.o fib-user.scm
 $ ./fib-user
 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 

Those who are interfacing to substantial C libraries should consider
using the [[easyffi]] egg. 

---

Back to [[The User's Manual]]

Next: [[Basic mode of operation]]
