This is a release of scsh, release 0.4.0. Scsh is a Unix shell that is embedded within R4RS Scheme. It provides high-level shell notation and full access to the Unix system calls. The current implementation is built on top of Scheme 48, version 0.36. We currently have scsh running on: AIX, CXUX, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, NetBSD, NeXTSTEP, Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix It's not hard to port scsh to new systems. You can get a copy of scsh via anonymous ftp, from the following: ftp://clark.lcs.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh.tar.gz ftp://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh.tar.gz These tar files include a detailed manual and a paper describing the design of the system. For the lazily curious, we also have the manual separately available as ftp://clark.lcs.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-manual.ps ftp://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/su/scsh/scsh-manual.ps Just click 'n view. The current release is primarily useful for writing shell scripts and doing general systems programming. Real interactive use needs a parser for an sh-like syntax, job control, and the gnu readline library. If you're interested in hacking on these things, drop us a line at scheme-underground@ai.mit.edu. We've got designs for most of this stuff; we're just short on time and bodies. New in this release: - The scsh network package, a complete interface for Berkeley-style sockets. We are going to keep the code for our higher-level protocols (ftp, telnet, http, and so forth) close to home for one more release. - The awk loop and field parser package. These two packages are documented in the reference manual. Lots of plans for the next release: libraries with network protocol code, the html parser and the server kit, module switches on the command line, threads -- we'll do our best. We thank Brent Benson, Travis V. Broughton, Brian Dennis, Noah Friedman Mike Gunter, Shriram Krishnamurthi, John P. Lewis, Tom Lord, Scott Schwartz, and Bill Sommerfeld, Michael Sperber, Axel Wienberg, for bug reports, bug fixes, and comments that were incorporated into this release. Brought to you by the Scheme Underground scsh team. -Olin Shivers & Brian Carlstrom Cambridge & Sunnyvale 31 October, 1995