by R. Kent Dybvig
Scheme was introduced in 1975 by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. [20,21], and was the first dialect of Lisp to fully support lexical scoping, first-class procedures, and continuations. In its earliest form it was a very small language intended primarily for research and teaching, supporting only a handful of predefined syntactic forms and procedures. Scheme is now a complete general-purpose programming language, though it still derives its power from a small set of key concepts. Early implementations of the language were interpreter-based and slow, but some current Scheme implementations boast sophisticated compilers that generate code on par with code generated by the best optimizing compilers for lower-level languages such as C and Fortran.
This book is intended to provide an introduction to the Scheme programming language but not an introduction to programming in general. The reader is expected to have had some experience programming and to be familiar with terms commonly associated with computers and programming languages. The author recommends that readers unfamiliar with Scheme or Lisp also read The Little Schemer [8] to become familiar with the concepts of list processing and recursion. Readers new to programming should begin with an introductory text on programming.
Scheme has been standardized both formally and informally. The "IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language" [13], describes the formal ANSI/IEEE Standard for Scheme. A related series of reports, the "Revised Reports on the Algorithmic Language Scheme," document an evolving informal standard that most implementations support. The current report in this series is the "Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme".
This book covers everything in both standards. Features included in the Revised5 Report but not in the ANSI/IEEE standard are identified as such when they are described. This book also documents the portable "syntax-case" syntactic abstraction system that has been adopted by many Scheme implementations. Features specific to particular implementations are not included. In particular, features specific to the author's Chez Scheme and Petite Chez Scheme are described separately in the Chez Scheme User's Guide.
A large number of small- to medium-sized examples are spread throughout the text, and one entire chapter is dedicated to the presentation of a set of longer examples. Many of the examples show how a standard Scheme syntactic form or procedure might be implemented; others implement useful extensions. Nearly all Scheme systems are interactive, and all of the examples can be entered directly from the keyboard into an interactive Scheme session.
Scheme was introduced in 1975 by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. [20,21], and was the first dialect of Lisp to fully support lexical scoping, first-class procedures, and continuations. In its earliest form it was a very small language intended primarily for research and teaching, supporting only a handful of predefined syntactic forms and procedures. Scheme is now a complete general-purpose programming language, though it still derives its power from a small set of key concepts. Early implementations of the language were interpreter-based and slow, but some current Scheme implementations boast sophisticated compilers that generate code on par with code generated by the best optimizing compilers for lower-level languages such as C and Fortran.
This book is intended to provide an introduction to the Scheme programming language but not an introduction to programming in general. The reader is expected to have had some experience programming and to be familiar with terms commonly associated with computers and programming languages. The author recommends that readers unfamiliar with Scheme or Lisp also read The Little Schemer [8] to become familiar with the concepts of list processing and recursion. Readers new to programming should begin with an introductory text on programming.
Scheme has been standardized both formally and informally. The "IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language" [13], describes the formal ANSI/IEEE Standard for Scheme. A related series of reports, the "Revised Reports on the Algorithmic Language Scheme," document an evolving informal standard that most implementations support. The current report in this series is the "Revised5 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme".
This book covers everything in both standards. Features included in the Revised5 Report but not in the ANSI/IEEE standard are identified as such when they are described. This book also documents the portable "syntax-case" syntactic abstraction system that has been adopted by many Scheme implementations. Features specific to particular implementations are not included. In particular, features specific to the author's Chez Scheme and Petite Chez Scheme are described separately in the Chez Scheme User's Guide.
A large number of small- to medium-sized examples are spread throughout the text, and one entire chapter is dedicated to the presentation of a set of longer examples. Many of the examples show how a standard Scheme syntactic form or procedure might be implemented; others implement useful extensions. Nearly all Scheme systems are interactive, and all of the examples can be entered directly from the keyboard into an interactive Scheme session.
