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Documentation lacking


Hi,

I really don't want to create any enemies here, but I think it
might be useful if I express my opinion.

As some may be aware, I have been looking at using guile as
a "formula" language for a spreadsheet.  I wanted to create a
spreadsheet program that used lisp expressions as formulas for 
the computation of each cell. As others have pointed
out, this has been done/thought of before.  This is, however,
irrelevant to my comments.

From my investigations, it seemed that guile (i.e. libguile) was
the perfect solution.  It is an implementation of scheme that is
intended to be embedded.  Thus, I decided to take a closer look
at guile.

While this would seem to have been a good idea at the start, from
my invesitagtion so far it seems to have been a complete waste of
time.  I can find no real documentation; I have looked at the 
documentation on the website, the documentation included with the
latest release, and the documentation from CVS (guile-doc). 
What is the basis of the guile interpretation of scheme?  How does it
evaluate scheme expressions?  I have found documentation on how it
stores values, but not much else.  What is the precision of integer
values?  Are
they 32 bit or 30 bit (it would seem 30 bit) (this is quite a basic
question, what about floats?).  I am sure (quite positive, in fact)
that the source code would answer all my questions, but I don't have
time for this.  I could write my own scheme interpreter 
in the time it would take me to read and understand guile source
code; and I don't consider myself any sort of exceptional programmer.  

Perhaps I am simply stupid (or am not looking hard enough), and can't
understand the documentation provided.  Or, perhaps, the documentation
is not sufficient.  Come on, I understand programmers not wanting to
document code, but if you want a library to be useful to others you have
to at least document the basic ideas and functions provided in the
library; not to mention how the library should be used.  This is only
common sense. 

Sincerely,

Derry Bryson

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