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(guile.info)What is Guile?

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What is Guile?
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Guile is an interpreter for the Scheme programming language, packaged
for use in a wide variety of environments.  Guile implements Scheme as
described in the Revised^5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme
(usually known as R5RS), providing clean and general data and control
structures.  Guile goes beyond the rather austere language presented in
R5RS, extending it with a module system, full access to POSIX system
calls, networking support, multiple threads, dynamic linking, a foreign
function call interface, powerful string processing, and many other
features needed for programming in the real world.

Like a shell, Guile can run interactively, reading expressions from the
user, evaluating them, and displaying the results, or as a script
interpreter, reading and executing Scheme code from a file.  However,
Guile is also packaged as an object library, allowing other applications
to easily incorporate a complete Scheme interpreter.  An application can
use Guile as an extension language, a clean and powerful configuration
language, or as multi-purpose "glue", connecting primitives provided by
the application.  It is easy to call Scheme code from C code and vice
versa, giving the application designer full control of how and when to
invoke the interpreter.  Applications can add new functions, data types,
control structures, and even syntax to Guile, creating a domain-specific
language tailored to the task at hand, but based on a robust language
design.

Guile's module system allows one to break up a large program into
manageable sections with well-defined interfaces between them.  Modules
may contain a mixture of interpreted and compiled code; Guile can use
either static or dynamic linking to incorporate compiled code.  Modules
also encourage developers to package up useful collections of routines
for general distribution; as of this writing, one can find Emacs
interfaces, database access routines, compilers, GUI toolkit interfaces,
and HTTP client functions, among others.

In the future, we hope to expand Guile to support other languages like
Tcl and Perl by translating them to Scheme code.  This means that users
can program applications which use Guile in the language of their
choice, rather than having the tastes of the application's author
imposed on them.