Overview of

Today's graphical toolkits for applicative languages are often not satisfactory. Most of the time, they ask the user to be an X window system <#14#>X window system<#14#> expert and force him/her to cope with arcane details such as server connections and event queues. This is a real problem, since programmers using this kind of languages are generally not inclined to system programming, and few of them will bridge the gap between the different abstraction levels.

~~~~Tk is a powerful graphical toolkit promising to fill that gap. It was developed at the University of Berkeley by John Ousterhout~[#Ouster-Tk##1###]. The toolkit offers high level widgets such as buttons or menus and is easily programmable, requiring little knowledge of X fundamentals. Tk relies on an interpretative shell-like language named Tcl~[#Ouster-Tcl##1###].

~~~~<#19#><#19#> is an implementation of the Scheme programming language, providing a full integration of the Tk toolkit. In this implementation, Scheme establishes the link between the user and the Tk toolkit, replacing Tcl.