Scheme

Scheme is a programming language that supports multiple paradigms, including functional programming and imperative programming. It is one of the two main dialects of the programming language Lisp and was developed to encourage good programming practices using a minimalist design philosophy.

History

Scheme was developed during the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI Lab. It was designed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman as a cleaner, simpler Lisp dialect. The language was heavily influenced by ALGOL and was designed to have a very small core with powerful tools for extending the language.

Features

Scheme is known for its minimalist design philosophy, which specifies a small standard core with powerful tools for language extension. This philosophy represents a significant departure from the design principles of other Lisp dialects, which tend to include a large number of primitives and special forms.

Scheme supports first-class procedures, which means that procedures can be passed as arguments, returned as values, and assigned to variables. It also supports tail call optimization, which allows for efficient implementation of iterative algorithms.

Scheme's syntax and semantics are uniform. All data types, including procedures, are treated uniformly. This uniformity is reflected in Scheme's core syntactic construct, the combination, which can represent procedure calls and special forms.

Implementations

There are many implementations of Scheme, including Chez Scheme, Racket, Chicken Scheme, and Guile. Each of these implementations has its own set of features and idiosyncrasies, but all adhere to the core principles of the Scheme language.

See also

• Lisp
• Functional programming
• Imperative programming
• Programming paradigm