Why Amalthea was Made
When I first discovered Io in the book mentioned above I found it both beautiful, fascinating, and confusing. It's syntax is extremly small and the language is based on a single simple but extremly powerful concept, continuations. I can't say I understood everything in that chapter at once but I returned to it now and then, piecing together an understanding of the concept and how it was used in Io. I later, with considerable help, embedded the language in Haskell to be able to explore it more in depth in preparation for a short speech I was to hold on Io in class. The embedding wasn't satisfactory however and felt quite a bit not like Io. So when time came to chose a project for the class I chose to make Amalthea, and to make it in Ocaml, to get a chance to learn that language as well. The world needed a publicly available Io interpreter and none existed.
The secondary motive, and the one I still hope for, was to make Amalthea a tool for learning about and ivestigating the ways continuations work. They are theoretically simple but getting a real feel for them is a different matter altogether. I hope someone will use Amalthea for this purpose.