Scheme is one of the two main dialects of the programming language Lisp. Unlike Common Lisp, the other main dialect, Scheme follows a minimalist design philosophy specifying a small standard core with powerful tools for language extension. Its compactness and elegance have made it popular with educators, language designers, programmers, implementors, and hobbyists. The language’s diverse appeal is seen as a strong point, though the consequently wide divergence between implementations is seen as one of the language’s weak points.
Scheme was developed at the MIT AI Lab by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman who introduced it to the academic world via a series of memos, now referred to as the Lambda Papers, over the period 1975-1980. The Scheme language is standardized in the official IEEE standard, and a de facto standard called the Revisedn Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (RnRS). The most widely implemented standard is R5RS (1998), and a new standard R6RS was ratified in 2007.
Scheme was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of its sister, Common Lisp.
Origin
History of the Scheme programming language
Scheme started as an attempt to understand Carl Hewitt’s Actor model, for which purpose Steele and Sussman wrote a “tiny Lisp interpreter” using Maclisp and then “added mechanisms for creating actors and sending messages.” Scheme was originally called “Schemer”, in the tradition of other Lisp-derived languages like Planner or Conniver. The current name resulted from the authors’ use of the ITS operating system, which limited filenames to two components of at most six characters each. Currently, “Schemer” is
commonly used to refer to a Scheme programmer.
Distinguishing features
Scheme is primarily a functional programming language. It shares many characteristics with other members of the Lisp programming language family. Scheme’s very simple syntax is based on s-expressions, parenthesized lists in which a prefix operator is followed by its arguments. Scheme programs thus consist of sequences of nested lists. Lists are also the main data structure in Scheme, leading to a close equivalence between source code and data formats (homoiconicity). Scheme programs can easily create and evaluate pieces of Scheme code dynamically.
The reliance on lists as data structures is shared by all Lisp dialects. Scheme inherits a rich set of list-processing primitives such as cons, car and cdr from its Lisp ancestors. Scheme uses strictly but dynamically typed variables and supports first-class functions. Thus, functions can be assigned as values to variables or passed as arguments to functions.
This section concentrates mainly on innovative features of the language, including those features that distinguish Scheme from other Lisps. Unless stated otherwise, descriptions of features relate to the R5RS standard.
In examples provided in this section, the notation “===> result” is used to indicate the result of evaluating the expression on the immediately preceding line. This is the same convention used in R5RS.
Fundamental design features
This subsection describes those features of Scheme that have distinguished it from other programming languages from its earliest days.
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