Scripting Language Documents

Summary

The following online documents are described below:

See also the Scripting Language Tutorial included in the Ada-ASSURED Scripting Language: Supplemental Manual.

Scheme

The scripting language of Ada-ASSURED is based on Scheme. Scheme is a powerful general-purpose programming language derived from Lisp. Although its syntax may be unfamiliar to you, it is easy to master. The real benefit of Scheme, however, is not its syntactic simplicity, but its semantic power.

The principle reference for Scheme is:

Revised(4) Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme, W. Clinger and J. Rees (editors), known as R4RS.

The Scheme Documentation (R4RS) is online. It is also included in:

Ada-ASSURED Scripting Language: Supplemental Manual

It is also distributed with Ada-ASSURED in PostScript (aahome/Ada-ASSURED/doc/r4rs.ps.Z). Numerous books about Scheme are available. Links to additional material on Scheme appear in Useful External Links

STk

The scripting language is actually a dialect of Scheme known as STk, which implements most of Scheme and has numerous extensions.

The principle reference for STk is:

STk Reference Manual, by Erik Gallesio.

which is included in:

Ada-ASSURED Scripting Language: Supplemental Manual

It is also distributed with Ada-ASSURED in PostScript (aahome/Ada-ASSURED/doc/stk.manual.ps.Z). This manual describes STk by explaining its differences from Scheme.

Snow

STk extends Scheme with the ability to manipulate GUI elements implemented with the Tk widget set. A dialect of STk, known as Snow (standing for ``Scheme with NO Windows'') omits the Tk extensions. Although future releases of Ada-ASSURED are likely to support full STk, the Ada-ASSURED 3.1 just supports Snow. All references to Scheme in Ada-ASSURED refer to the Snow dialect of STk.

Ada-ASSURED Scripting Language

GrammaTech has extended Snow with features specific to Ada-ASSURED. All references to the Ada-ASSURED Scripting Language refer to Snow, augmented with the Ada-ASSURED extensions.

The principle reference for the Ada-ASSURED extensions to Snow is:

Ada-ASSURED's Reference Manual, Chapter 15.

A list of Ada-ASSURED's Scripting Language Interface is online. The Ada-ASSURED Ada grammar, which is useful when writing scripts, is also online. The Ada-ASSURED Tutorial contains a script example.