Warning: This is the manual of the legacy Guile 2.0 series. You may want to read the manual of the current stable series instead.

2.1 Running Guile Interactively

In its simplest form, Guile acts as an interactive interpreter for the Scheme programming language, reading and evaluating Scheme expressions the user enters from the terminal. Here is a sample interaction between Guile and a user; the user’s input appears after the $ and scheme@(guile-user)> prompts:

$ guile
scheme@(guile-user)> (+ 1 2 3)                ; add some numbers
$1 = 6
scheme@(guile-user)> (define (factorial n)    ; define a function
                       (if (zero? n) 1 (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))
scheme@(guile-user)> (factorial 20)
$2 = 2432902008176640000
scheme@(guile-user)> (getpwnam "root")        ; look in /etc/passwd
$3 = #("root" "x" 0 0 "root" "/root" "/bin/bash")
scheme@(guile-user)> C-d
$