Chapter 1. Introduction

Gamma is an interpreter, a high-level programming language that has been designed and optimized to reduce the time required for building applications. It has support for the Photon GIU in QNX, and the GTK GUI in Linux and QNX 6. It also has extensions that support HTTP and MySQL.

With Gamma a user can quickly implement algorithms that are far harder to express in other languages such as C. Gamma lets the developer take advantage of many time-saving features such as memory management and improved GUI support. These features, coupled with the ability to fully interact with and debug programs as they run, mean that developers can build, test and refine applications in a shorter time frame than when using other development platforms.

Gamma programs are small, fast and reliable. Gamma is easily embedded into today's smart appliances and web devices.

Gamma is an improved and expanded version of our previous Slang Programming Language for QNX and Photon. Gamma is available on QNX 4, QNX 6 and Linux, and is being ported to Microsoft Windows.

The implementation of Gamma is based on a powerful SCADALisp engine. SCADALisp is a dialect of the Lisp programming language which has been optimized for performance and memory usage, and enhanced with a number of internal functions. All references in this manual to Lisp are in fact to the SCADALisp dialect of Lisp.

You could say Gamma's object language is Lisp, just like Assembler is the object language for C. Knowing Lisp is not a requirement for using Gamma, but it can be helpful. All necessary information on Lisp and how it relates to Gamma is in the Input and Output chapter of this guide.