Most of the work for the class will be done in MIT/GNU Scheme. If you have an x86 computer running GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows, you can install the software on that computer. Otherwise, we will provide you an account on an appropriately configured computer.
If you are going to install the software on your computer, download the current snapshot (dated as of this writing) from here and follow the installation instructions from that page.
Once installed, you can start MIT/GNU Scheme using the command
scheme --edwin --heap 4000 --edit
Later in the term we will be using the mechanics system, a version of MIT/GNU Scheme that is enhanced with the Scmutils software, which provides a rich set of mathematical tools. Again, you will have the choice of installing this software on your computer, or using one of the class computers.
If you choose to install on your computer, all files will be installed in the directory structure "/usr/local/scmutils". The mechanics system has several parts:
One part is the Scheme system itself. We provide a Scheme system as part of this distribution. It will install itself so as to not interfere with any other Scheme you may currently have. The installation will install a script named mechanics in "/usr/local/bin" that invokes the Scheme system that runs the mechanics system.
The other part is for Scmutils, the numerical and algebraic packages, written in Scheme.
The installed system requires about 34 Megabytes of disk space. Before downloading the tar file, be sure you have at least 55 Megabytes free on "/usr/local".
Installation instructions:
Download (a tar file, compressed with gzip) into a temporary directory of your choice. This file is about 20 megabytes long. Let's assume that you put the file into "/tmp/" .
Be sure you are logged in with root privileges. If your system does not have a directory "/usr/local", you will need to create one. Then execute the command lines:
cd /usr/local
tar xzf /tmp/
The command line to start the Scheme mechanics system is
/usr/local/bin/mechanics
(If "/usr/local/bin" is on your search path you need not specify the whole path.)
If everything seems to work you can now remove the tar file:
rm /tmp/
Note: We have tested this Scheme system under Debian GNU/Linux version 3.1 and Linux kernels in the and 2.4 and 2.6 series. The binaries depend on GNU libc version 2.3. It will not run on a system that uses older libc versions, which includes any distribution older than about one year. In that case, you should follow the directions here to replace the "/usr/local/scmutils/mit-scheme/bin/scheme" and "/usr/local/scmutils/mit-scheme/bin/bchscheme" files. You may ask for help if you run into problems, but please try the above procedure first.
Instructions for using the system can be found here.
A draft reference manual describing many parts of the system can be found here.
Rudimentary instructions for graphing can be found here.
These documents are included in the "/usr/local/scmutils/manual/" directory that will be unpacked with the tar file. Scheme sources for the entire system are included in the "/usr/local/scmutils/src/" directory.
Note that this is all free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Also, this is all software developed for education and research at MIT. This code is not carefully tested so it may have errors. We hope that it can help you, but we make no warranty.