                               doc/primers



The files in this directory are intended to be the key ones that people
wishing to build new packages for Reduce (or do large scale maintenance
of old ones) might find helpful. It is possible that some of the
files included here may also be present elsewhere in the Reduce source
tree, but the copies here are so that programmers can find much of what
they need in just one place.

The initial set of files here includes:
 (1) The Standard Lisp Report, documenting the set of Lisp functions
     that Reduce relied on from around 1980. Note that in reality the
     current understanding of what can be used has drifted onwards, but
     this is still a good starting point.
 (2) The Symbolic Mode Primer by Herbert Melenk, which can help a programmer
     get to grips with the key conventions and data structures used in
     Reduce.
 (3) A document "Inside Reduce" by Norman and Vitolo that covers similar
     ground to the Melenk primer, but may be found useful since it
     provides additional or complementary coverage of some topics.

Reduce developers and users are invited to contribute more material that
could be useful to the audience addressed by the above documents. If the
contribution will comfortably fit as an extra section within one of the
existing documents and the contributor agrees it may end up merged in that
way (e.g., the Standard Lisp Report could perhaps do with an appendix
documenting some of the alterations to usage made since 1980), but
free-standing documents of any size would be welcome.
