1.1 Basics of Starting Scheme

The Debian packages of MIT/GNU Scheme Pucked should make the program available to launch in a terminal or graphical window. Depending on your desktop, you might select from a menu of “applications” or “programs.” You might also search, e.g. for “scheme”, in Ubuntu’s Unity or another program launcher.

If Scheme does not seem to be available through your launcher, you should still be able to run it with a shell (terminal) command line. Simply enter the command

mit-scheme-pucked --edit

and Scheme will load and print something like this:

MIT/GNU Scheme Pucked running under GNU/Linux
Type `^C' (control-C) followed by `H' to obtain information about interrupts.

Copyright (C) 2019 Matthew Birkholz
Copyright (C) 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Image saved on Friday December 13, 2019 at 4:34:49 PM
  Release 10.1.20 || SF || LIAR/x86-64
;Loading Edwin... done

It will open a graphical window if it can, else it will prompt for input in the terminal.

The version information shown above can be printed again by evaluating this expression.

(identify-world)

‘Release’ is the release number for the entire Scheme system. This number is changed each time a new version of Scheme is released. ‘Microcode’ is the version number for the part of the system that is written in C. ‘Runtime’ is the version number for the part of the system that is written in Scheme.

Following this there may be additional version numbers for specific subsystems. ‘SF’ refers to the scode optimization program sf; ‘LIAR/ARCH’ is the native-code compiler, where ARCH is the native-code architecture it compiles to; ‘Edwin’ is the Emacs-like text editor. There are other subsystems you can load that will add themselves to this list.