1. A simple Scheme-to-C compiler Why CHICKEN? - R5RS support. - SRFIs 0, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22 and 23 - Syntax-case highlevel macros - Lightweight threads based on first-class continuations - Pattern matching with Andrew Wright's match package - Record structures - A simple and straightforward module system - An object system with multiple inheritance, multimethods and a meta-object protocol - Separated compilation poses no problem and full tail-recursion and first-class continuations are suported. - Extended comment- and string-literal syntaxes - Libraries for regular expressions, string handling, Common LISP style format, UNIX system calls and extended data structures - Create interpreted or compiled shell scripts written in Scheme - Compiled C files can be easily distributed - Generates quite portable C code and compiled files generated by it (including itself) should work without any change on DOS, Windows, most UNIX-like platforms, and with minor changes on other systems. - Linkage to C modules and C library functions is straightforward. Compiled programs can easily be embedded into existing C code. - Simple. It can be used as a pedagogical tool for anybody who is interested in the workings of a compiler. - Extendable, since its code generation scheme, runtime system, and garbage collector fit neatly into a C environment. - Offers better performance than nearly all interpreter based implementations, but still provides full Scheme semantics. - Probably is the first implementation of Scheme that uses Henry Baker's [Cheney on the M.T.A] concept. Usually, you will also need to install the chicken-dev package. The source files are not included since you could easily get them with the Debian source package. If you really feel the needs to get them under /usr/share/chicken/src, then please let me know. There are many Scheme implementations available in Debian, have a look at each of them! Have fun! From Debian 3.0r0 APT