Kawa is an implementation of Scheme, which is in the Lisp family of programming languages. Kawa is a featureful dialect in its own right, and additionally provides very useful integration with Java. It can be used as a “scripting language”, but includes a compiler and all the benefits of a “real” programming language, including optional static typing, so Kawa programs can be as efficient as Java.

Kawa is also a useful framework for implementing other programming languages on the Java platform. It has has many useful utility classes.

This documents version 1.12, updated 9 April 2012. See the summary of recent changes.

For lots of Scheme resources, see www.schemers.org, including an online copy of the R6RS standard. A nice quick introduction to Scheme can be found in Greg Badros's lecture notes. A more in-depth tutorial which also discusses Scheme implementation is Paul Wilson's "An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation".

For copyright information on the software and documentation, see License.

Various people and orgnizations have contributed to Kawa.

This package has nothing to do with the defunct Kawa commercial Java IDE.