Kawa (Scheme implementation)

Last updated
Kawa
Kawa-logo.svg
Family Lisp
Designed by Per Bothner
Developer The Kawa Community
First appeared10 June 1996;26 years ago (1996-06-10) [1]
Stable release
3.1.1 [2] / 16 January 2020;3 years ago (2020-01-16) (w/R7RS compatibility)
Implementation language Java, Scheme
Platform Java virtual machine
OS Cross-platform
License MIT
Website www.gnu.org/software/kawa
Influenced by
Lisp, Scheme

Kawa is a language framework written in the programming language Java that implements the programming language Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, and can be used to implement other languages to run on the Java virtual machine (JVM). It is a part of the GNU Project.

Contents

The name Kawa comes from the Polish word for coffee; a play on words, since Java is another familiar name for coffee.

Kawa is notable as one of the few programming languages with support for units of measure in the form of quantities.

Integration with Java

Besides using the language Scheme, Java object fields and methods can be accessed using code such as: (invokeobject'methodargument...). This will invoke a Java method, and does the same thing as object.method(argument,...) in Java. An object's fields can be accessed with: object:field-name or (invokeobject'field-name). Static (class) methods can be invoked with the function invoke-static. Kawa can be extended with Java code (by creating scheme functions in Java), and combined with other JVM implementations.

See also

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References

  1. "Change log" . Retrieved 2022-04-04.
  2. "Kawa: News – Recent Changes". gnu.org. Retrieved 2020-02-14.
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