Arena Scripting Language Interpreter
(C) 2006, Pascal Schmidt <arena-language@ewetel.net>

INTRODUCTION
------------

arena is an interpreter for the scripting language "Arena".
The language is similar to C with respect to the syntax
and standard library provided. However, Arena has automatic
memory management and runtime polymorphism, which makes it
more suitable to ad-hoc scripting than C.

The plain text master for the language and library manual
can be found in doc/manual/manual.asc. This and an Arena
script called "transform" will be present in the directory
/usr/local/share/doc/arena (this depends on the installation
prefix, however) after installation. The script can be used
to generate plain text, HTML, and LaTeX versions of the
manual.

Options of the interpreter itself are documented in a man
page arena(1). A couple of example scripts can be found in
the examples/ directory of the source tree.

More information about Arena and the interpreter can be
found on the homepage, which is currently located at:

	http://www.minimalinux.org/arena/

Problems and bugs should be reported to the maintainer by
email:

	Pascal Schmidt <arena-language@ewetel.net>


LICENSE
-------

The arena interpreter is licensed under the BSD license in
its variant without advertising clause. A copy of the license
is included in the file doc/LICENSE.


INSTALLATION
------------

To build and install arena, simply type:

	./configure
	make
	make install

You can also run the regression test suite by invoking:

	make test

Uninstalling all the files later should be possible with:

	make uninstall

Note that you need to run ./configure with the same prefix
as before the "make install" if you want to uninstall later
using a freshly unpacked source tree. You don't need to do
the regular "make" run before "make uninstall".


REQUIREMENTS
------------

In order to build the arena interpreter, your system needs
an ANSI C89 compatible C compiler with matching C library.
No additional libraries should be required.

The build is known to work with GCC and Sun C on several
operating systems. Information about other environments would
be appreciated, as well as patches to support these if they
don't work with the current sources.


SUPPORTED SYSTEMS
-----------------

The arena interpreter is known to work on the following operating
systems and/or distributions at the moment:

	MacOS X 10.3.9 (Panther) on PowerPC
	MacOS X 10.4.6 (Tiger) on PowerPC
	OpenBSD 3.9 on Alpha, x86, PowerPC, SGI, SPARC
	Slackware Linux 10.0 on x86
	Slackintosh Linux 10.2.0 on PowerPC
	Solaris 10 on SPARC
	Solaris 10 on x86 
	Solaris 9 on SPARC
	Solaris 8 on SPARC
	Windows NT 4.0 using GCC w/ MSVCRT 2.9.5
	Windows XP using GCC w/ Cygwin

The foreign function call interface for loading and calling
C libraries is known to work on the following operating systems
at the moment:

	Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) on PowerPC
	Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Tiger) on PowerPC
	Slackware Linux 10.0 on x86
	Solaris 10 on x86 w/ GCC
	Solaris 8 to 10 on SPARC w/ GCC or Sun C

The following C compilers have been tested to work:

	gcc 2.95.x, 3.x, 4.0.x
	Sun C 5.8

The following make implementations have been tested to work:

	BSD make
	GNU make
	Solaris make

The following systems are known NOT to work at the moment:

	SunOS 4 (sprintf not conforming to C89)
