The mechanics system has several parts:

The other part is Scmutils, the numerical and algebraic packages, written in Scheme, that we will use for the mechanics work. The installation will install a script named mechanics.sh in /usr/local/bin that invokes the Scheme system that runs the mechanics system.

One part is the MIT/GNU Scheme system. It is available from here .

Installation instructions:

Be sure you are logged in with root privileges. If your system does not have a directory /usr/local , you will need to create one.

Download the current stable relase (currently 10.1.11) of MIT/GNU Scheme from here.

Follow the instructions here. You may need to use root privileges (sudo) to do this installation. NOTE: In addition to the packages said to be needed before configuring the Scheme (For a Debian-based system like Ubuntu you need to gcc , make , libcurses-dev , and libx11-dev ) you must also make sure that you also must have m4 . To do this execute sudo apt install gcc make libcurses-dev libx11-dev m4 .

Download the current Scmutils installation from here. The 20200810 part of the name is the date this installation was created. This is a gzipped tar archive file.

Expand this gzipped tar archive by executing tar xzf scmutils-20200810.tar.gz . This will make a directory named scmutils-20200810 .

Enter the directory with cd scmutils-20200810 . In the directory you will find installation instructions in the file INSTALL . It will tell you to execute the installation script install.sh . Do it. This installs Scmutils into your MIT/GNU Scheme system's library.

The directory scmutils-20200810 has all of the source files for your scmutils distribution. It also has the script mechanics.sh , which is used to start the system. That script should be put in a directory on your search path. Traditionally that script goes into /usr/local/bin . You may give that script any name you please, but if you keep it as mechanics.sh in /usr/local/bin the command line to start the Scheme mechanics system is

/usr/local/bin/mechanics

(If /usr/local/bin is on your search path you need not specify the whole path.)

The system starts with the MIT/GNU Scheme prompt. One way to use it is from the Edwin editor, an EMACS18 which is implemented in Scheme, and which is integrated with the Scheme debugger. This is how I (GJS) tend to use the system. To start Edwin type (edit) at the Scheme read-eval-print loop. It is also possible to run our system under the standard GNU EMACS.