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Your claim is revisionist and, in my view, nonsense. Scheme is most certainly a Lisp. I mean, you can think what you like, and of course postmodernism is a thin
by tonyg 8y ago
Your claim is revisionist and, in my view, nonsense. Scheme is most certainly a Lisp. I mean, you can think what you like, and of course postmodernism is a thing, "the author is dead" and so forth, but if you look at the history, it's very, very clear that Scheme is a Lisp; that is, it is a member of the Lisp language family.
You can even read the words of the people who invented and developed the language:
"SCHEME is essentially a full-funarg LISP." - page 1, "Scheme, an interpreter for extended lambda calculus", Sussman and Steele, Dec 1975. AI memo #349.
"SCHEME is a dialect of LISP." - abstract, "The Revised Report on SCHEME, a Dialect of LISP", Steele and Sussman, Jan 1978. AI memo #452.
"Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language [...] Scheme differs from Common Lisp in its emphasis upon simplicity and function over compatibility with older dialects of Lisp." - page 4, "The Revised Revised Report on Scheme, or An UnCommon Lisp", Rees and Clinger (eds.), Aug 1985. AI memo #848.
"Scheme has influenced the evolution of Lisp. [...] Scheme was the first major dialect of Lisp to [do many things]" - introduction, "Revised^3 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme", Rees and Clinger (eds.), Dec 1986. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 21(12).
"Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language" - summary of the R4RS, the R5RS, the R6RS and even the bloody R7RS.
Compare and contrast to the opening words of the Introduction to CLtL2, which are "Common Lisp is a new dialect of Lisp, a successor to MacLisp, influenced strongly by Zetalisp and to some extent by Scheme and Interlisp."
If Scheme is "not a Lisp", then neither is Common Lisp.
- pjmlp 8y agoCtrl+F "dialect" makes my point.
- bjoli 8y agoCL is a lisp dialect as well. Just because it is the biggest doesn't make it the only lisp entitled to be called a lisp
- M_Bakhtiari 8y ago> Just because it is the biggest doesn't make it the only lisp entitled to be called a lisp That's not what's being argued, though.
- lispm 8y agoWhy not call a Scheme a Scheme? That would be natural since the language is a direct implementation of the Scheme R7RS standard and not compatible with other Lisp dialects.
- lispm 8y agoCommon Lisp is a successor ro Maclisp, which was a successor for the original Lisp implementation. Common Lisp was designed such that the old code can be ported to a modernized version of Lisp. This code moved from Lisp 1.5 to Maclisp to ZetaLisp and to Common Lisp. Scheme OTOH has its own code bases, its own libraries, its own standards, its own books, its own community. It is a Lisp, but that has become more or less meaningless for practical work. Being 'a Lisp" means practically very little. It's just a name with an unclear definition and less and less practical value. Thus 'a Lisp' means mostly an unspecified bunch of dialects which are in practical terms mostly unrelated. I prefer a stronger definition, where Lisp means those dialects and their implementation which actually share code, books, libraries, tools. Otherwise people get the impression of some compatibility, which in real life isn't given. It's like a family member, which used to carry your name, but now has left the house and has its own life.