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One thing I'll never understand about Scheme/Lisp is why they need so many versions (of the standard, and of different compilers).
by dpc_pw 6y ago
One thing I'll never understand about Scheme/Lisp is why they need so many versions (of the standard, and of different compilers).
- nerdponx 6y agoI don't think it's entirely a matter of "need". All these implementations are independent projects. Some of them include their own features on top of the standard. Some of them focus on specific use cases and/or optimize for specific performance characteristics. Some of them are toy projects. How many C implementations/compilers are there? Even Python (which has a massive and often ill-defined spec) has multiple implementations.
- dpc_pw 6y ago> How many C implementations/compilers are there? I can compile same source code with pretty much any C compiler. I might be wrong, but the lisp compilers are all "slightly different". I guess scheme ones can be the same? But are they really?
- nerdponx 6y agoThat's fair, until you get into GCC extensions. I guess the difference is that the Scheme "core" is typically smaller and the amount of extensions is typically larger. See also: Common Lisp, which has a similar problem.