Kawa (Scheme implementation)

Kawa

Family	Lisp
Designed by	Per Bothner
Developer	The Kawa Community
First appeared	10 June 1996 (1996-06-10)
Stable release	3.1.1 / 16 January 2020 (2020-01-16) (w/R7RS compatibility)
Implementation language	Java, Scheme
Platform	Java virtual machine
OS	Cross-platform
License	MIT
Website	www.gnu.org/software/kawa
Influenced by
Lisp, Scheme

Kawa is a language framework written in the programming language Java that implements the programming language Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, and can be used to implement other languages to run on the Java virtual machine (JVM). It is a part of the GNU Project.

The name Kawa comes from the Polish word for coffee; a play on words, since Java is another familiar name for coffee.

Kawa is notable as one of the few programming languages with support for units of measure in the form of quantities.

Integration with Java

Besides using the language Scheme, Java object fields and methods can be accessed using code such as: <syntaxhighlight lang="scheme" class="" style="" inline="1">(invoke object 'method argument ...)</syntaxhighlight>. This will invoke a Java method, and does the same thing as <syntaxhighlight lang="java" class="" style="" inline="1">object.method(argument, ...)</syntaxhighlight> in Java. An object's fields can be accessed with: <syntaxhighlight lang="text" class="" style="" inline="1">object:field-name</syntaxhighlight> or <syntaxhighlight lang="scheme" class="" style="" inline="1">(invoke object 'field-name)</syntaxhighlight>. Static (class) methods can be invoked with the function <syntaxhighlight lang="text" class="" style="" inline="1">invoke-static</syntaxhighlight>. Kawa can be extended with Java code (by creating scheme functions in Java), and combined with other JVM implementations.

See also

• List of JVM languages