1.1 A Scheme Crash Course

Guix uses the Guile implementation of Scheme. To start playing with the language, install it with guix install guile and start a REPL—short for read-eval-print loop—by running guile from the command line.

Alternatively you can also run guix environment --ad-hoc guile -- guile if you’d rather not have Guile installed in your user profile.

In the following examples, lines show what you would type at the REPL; lines starting with “⇒” show evaluation results, while lines starting with “-|” show things that get printed. See Using Guile Interactively in GNU Guile Reference Manual, for more details on the REPL.

• Scheme syntax boils down to a tree of expressions (or s-expression in Lisp lingo). An expression can be a literal such as numbers and strings, or a compound which is a parenthesized list of compounds and literals. #true and #false (abbreviated #t and #f) stand for the Booleans “true” and “false”, respectively.

  Examples of valid expressions:

  "Hello World!"
  ⇒ "Hello World!"
  
  17
  ⇒ 17
  
  (display (string-append "Hello " "Guix" "\n"))
  -| Hello Guix!
  ⇒ #<unspecified>
  

• This last example is a function call nested in another function call. When a parenthesized expression is evaluated, the first term is the function and the rest are the arguments passed to the function. Every function returns the last evaluated expression as its return value.
• Anonymous functions are declared with the lambda term:

  (lambda (x) (* x x))
  ⇒ #<procedure 120e348 at <unknown port>:24:0 (x)>
  

  The above procedure returns the square of its argument. Since everything is an expression, the lambda expression returns an anonymous procedure, which can in turn be applied to an argument:

  ((lambda (x) (* x x)) 3)
  ⇒ 9
  

• Anything can be assigned a global name with define:

  (define a 3)
  (define square (lambda (x) (* x x)))
  (square a)
  ⇒ 9
  

• Procedures can be defined more concisely with the following syntax:

  (define (square x) (* x x))
  

• A list structure can be created with the list procedure:

  (list 2 a 5 7)
  ⇒ (2 3 5 7)
  

• The quote disables evaluation of a parenthesized expression: the first term is not called over the other terms (see quote in GNU Guile Reference Manual). Thus it effectively returns a list of terms.

  '(display (string-append "Hello " "Guix" "\n"))
  ⇒ (display (string-append "Hello " "Guix" "\n"))
  
  '(2 a 5 7)
  ⇒ (2 a 5 7)
  

• The quasiquote disables evaluation of a parenthesized expression until unquote (a comma) re-enables it. Thus it provides us with fine-grained control over what is evaluated and what is not.

  `(2 a 5 7 (2 ,a 5 ,(+ a 4)))
  ⇒ (2 a 5 7 (2 3 5 7))
  

  Note that the above result is a list of mixed elements: numbers, symbols (here a) and the last element is a list itself.

• Multiple variables can be named locally with let (see Local Bindings in GNU Guile Reference Manual):

  (define x 10)
  (let ((x 2)
        (y 3))
    (list x y))
  ⇒ (2 3)
  
  x
  ⇒ 10
  
  y
  error→ In procedure module-lookup: Unbound variable: y
  

  Use let* to allow later variable declarations to refer to earlier definitions.

  (let* ((x 2)
         (y (* x 3)))
    (list x y))
  ⇒ (2 6)
  

• Keywords are typically used to identify the named parameters of a procedure. They are prefixed by #: (hash, colon) followed by alphanumeric characters: #:like-this. See Keywords in GNU Guile Reference Manual.
• The percentage % is typically used for read-only global variables in the build stage. Note that it is merely a convention, like _ in C. Scheme treats % exactly the same as any other letter.
• Modules are created with define-module (see Creating Guile Modules in GNU Guile Reference Manual). For instance

  (define-module (guix build-system ruby)
    #:use-module (guix store)
    #:export (ruby-build
              ruby-build-system))
  

  defines the module guix build-system ruby which must be located in guix/build-system/ruby.scm somewhere in the Guile load path. It depends on the (guix store) module and it exports two variables, ruby-build and ruby-build-system.

For a more detailed introduction, check out Scheme at a Glance, by Steve Litt.

One of the reference Scheme books is the seminal “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”, by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman. You’ll find a free copy online, together with videos of the lectures by the authors. The book is available in Texinfo format as the sicp Guix package. Go ahead, run guix install sicp and start reading with info sicp (see Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). An unofficial ebook is also available.

You’ll find more books, tutorials and other resources at https://schemers.org/.