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SXM is a portable implementation of the Scheme Programming language.
It conforms to IEEE/ANSI standard of Scheme and supports all features
of the R5RS Report on Scheme. In addition, SXM supports numerous 
features of Chez Scheme v6.0 and SRFIs 0, 6, 8, 9, 11, and 16.

SXM is derived from David Michael Betz's XScheme v0.28. Due to the 
loss of compatibility with the original (object system has been dropped) 
and significant amount of modifications and additions (SXM is 4 times 
bigger), I decided to treat it as a separate project with its own name.
It still carries a lot of design decisions from the original though:

- runtime system is written in portable C
- minimal dependency on OS-specific features
- no S-exp interpreter; Scheme code is compiled to byte code and then
  executed via bytecode VM
- mark-sweep garbage collector
- simplified numerical tower (fixnums/flonums only)
- heap image save/restore

During its 10-year-long history as a hobby project, SXM acquired
a lot of new features:

- optimizing bytecode compiler written in Scheme and C ("Frobit")
- support for multiple global environments ("locales")
- extra data types (boxes, hash tables, weak pairs)
- full support for IEEE/ANSI and R5RS specifications, including
  hygienic macros, multiple return values, dynamic-wind, and eval.
- optional Unicode support based on ANSI C's wide char library
- convenient mechanism to extend the basic set of Scheme
  procedures written in C
- flexible mechanism for adding new kinds of ports
- almost complete set of Chez Scheme features, including
  syntax-case macro system (CS v5.9f), reader extensions,
  parameters, interactive facilities, engines, and pretty-printing.
- SXM 1.1 supports Chez Scheme's and SRFI 9 structures
- extensive library of string functions
- exceptions (based on ideas from '98 Baltimore Workshop)
- support for several SRFIs (0, 6, 8, 9, 11, and 16).

This distribution is a second public release of SXM. Bug reports, 
comments, and suggestions can be sent to the author at [email protected].

Installation instructions in file Install.

A list of top-level forms is in Formlist (built automatically).

Recent changes are listed in file News (if present).

Known bugs and things to do in the future are listed in Todo.

SXM was tested on the following configurations:

    Linux/i386/gcc
    Linux/alpha/gcc
    BSD/i386/gcc
    Solaris/sparc/gcc
    Plan9/i386/pcc
    Cygwin/i386/gcc
    WinNT/i386/msvc


The SXM root directory should contain the following subdirectories:

    doc            some documentation
    optional       optional OS-specific components
    scheme         run-time system sources
    tests          r5rs and miscellaneous tests
    win32          Win32-specific sources and projects
    unicode        unicode support (Win32 only)
    contrib        code contributed by various authors (optional)

The SXM root directory should contain the following files:

    Readme         this file
    Install        installation instructions
    News           ? recent changes
    Todo           list of bugs and things to do
    Makefile       makefile for GNU make
    mkfile         makefile for Plan 9's mk
    sx*.c          core SXM files
    io*.c          SXM ports of various types
    os*.c          OS-dependent procedures
    *.c            top-level Scheme procedures
    sxeme.h        C declarations and macros for SXM data structures
    *.h            other headers
    sxm.man        a Unix-style man page
    sxm.spec       RPM spec