You’ve heard about all the hot scripting languages – you might even be tired of hearing about them. But Kawa offers you something different than the scripting-language du-jour can. You may be interested in one that runs on the Java virtual machine, either because you have to interact with other Java tools, or because you like having access to all the Java packages out there. Or maybe you don’t care about Java, but you care about performance. If so, let me tell you about Kawa, which is actually one of the very oldest language implementations running on the Java Virtual Machine, dating back to 1996.
The Kawa language is a dialect/implementation of the Scheme language. (The Kawa project also supports other languages, including XQuery and Emacs Lisp, as well as tools for implementing mew programming languages, but we won’t cover that in this tutorial.)
Scheme is an established language with many implementations, a standard specification (the traditional R5RS, R6RS which was ratified in 2007, and R7RS which was ratified in 2013), and is used by universities for both teaching and research. Scheme also has a reputation for being difficult to learn, with a weird parenthesis-heavy syntax, and hard-to-understand concepts like continuations. Luckily, you don’t need to understand continuations! (Kawa doesn’t fully implement them anyway.)
The following assumes that Kawa is already installed on your computer;
if not see these installation instructions.
Running the kawa command in interactive mode
is a good way start learning Kawa:
$kawa#|kawa:1|#
If you don’t have kawa but you have a
Kawa “jar” and you have Java installed you can instead do:
$java -jar kawa-#|kawa:1|#version-number.jar
The prompt string has the form of a Scheme comment, to make it easier to cut-and-paste. Kawa is expecting you type in an expression or command, which it will evaluate, and then print out the result. For example, a quoted string is a simple expression that evaluates to a string value, which will print as itself, before printing the next prompt:
#|kawa:1|#"Hello, world!"Hello, world! #|kawa:2|#
The most noticable difference from most other programming languages
is that Scheme uses “prefix” notation for function calls.
For example Kawa has a function max which returns the
largest value of the arguments.
Instead of max(5, 7, 3)
you write (max 5 7 3):
(max 5 7 3) ⇒ 7
(We use the ⇒ symbol above to indicate that
the expression (max 5 7 3) evaluates to the
value 7.)
The prefix notation may feel a bit weird, but you quickly
get used to it, and it has some advantages.
One is consistency: What are special infix operators in most languages
are just regular functions in Scheme.
For example, addition is just a regular function call,
and + is just a regular function name:
(+ 2.5 1.2) ⇒ 3.7
The same prefix notation is used for special operations like assignments:
#|kawa:1|#(set! sqrt-of-2 (sqrt 2))#|kawa:2|#sqrt-of-21.4142135623730951
