This file is part of the Kaenguru Database System
Copyright (c) 1997,98 by Gregor Klinke
  
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
  
This program ist distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
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This is Kaenguru Database System version 0.2 alpha


Kaenguru is a simple, but highly configurable database system build around
a scheme (r4rs) like interpreter (called the k4-machine).  It provides:

- a odd object oriented data design, modelling data (strings, numbers, any
(greater) chunks of data) into complex objects, i.e. data `items' are not
atomic (like in lincks), but are structures containing different types;

- the possibility to define and combine totally different data classes
  (schemas) in an consistent access system

- polymorphism; each data classes, in fact each data object, may implement
  its own method overriding superclass export/store/doSomething methods

- an smalltalk (or better: meron/meronet) like method look (send an-object
  'a-method an-argument)

- highly flexible typing of attribut-slots due to the weak typed `features'
  of k4/scheme

- no standard interface language.  Every front end connecting to kaenguru
  has to use the k4/scheme language directly (through the API)

Please note that I regard Kaenguru as Alpha Software.  There is no full
featured frontend (you can't call the monitor kd_mon as an frontend at
all), and without a frontend you can't do anything with kaenguru.  It
hasn't been tested at all (really).  There is a lot of dull stuff in the
index generation and in the k4/scheme machine, arrgh, I think it is
everyway.  Although the daemon and server are pretty stable by now (as far
as I experienced during my work on a universal frontend), there is no
hope to claim it yet reliable.
