3 ms·

> Scheme however isn't a standardized language, like Common Lisp. Scheme is a standardized language. The first standards defined a relatively small language, a

by lispm 12y ago

> Scheme however isn't a standardized language, like Common Lisp. Scheme is a standardized language. The first standards defined a relatively small language, also useful for teaching purposes. Then it was tried to define a more modern Scheme with a core language and a library. The R6RS standard was kind of controversial and now there is work for quite some time on R7RS. Additionally the Scheme community has a process to define extensions. Generally the landscape of Scheme is quite a bit more fragmented than the CL landscape. The implementations can differ widely in their implemented language. But if you look at individual systems, Scheme systems have to offer quite a lot. Also, historically there are a several really excellent Scheme books for learning programming and/or computer science. This site, news.ycombinator.com , actually is written in a Lisp dialect (Arc) running on top of a 'Scheme'.

_delirium 12y ago
In practice I tend to think of Scheme as quasi-standardized, in the sense that there is a standard core, but it's difficult to stay within it. Whereas with standards like C99, Fortran 90, or ANSI CL, it's quite common for people to write nontrivial standards-conforming programs that you can expect to run unmodified across implementations. Culturally the Common Lisp community also seems more interested in maintaining portability even when leaving the confines of the official standard, through the heavy use of compatibility layers like Bordeaux-Threads. The Scheme approach seems to be to just target a specific implementation, and share functionality across them on a case-by-case basis by porting libraries (which is sometimes trivial, and sometimes more involved). Hence CL has Quicklisp, while Scheme has a package repository per system.

3 ms·

> Scheme however isn't a standardized language, like Common Lisp. Scheme is a standardized language. The first standards defined a relatively small language, a

by lispm 12y ago

_delirium 12y ago
In practice I tend to think of Scheme as quasi-standardized, in the sense that there is a standard core, but it's difficult to stay within it. Whereas with standards like C99, Fortran 90, or ANSI CL, it's quite common for people to write nontrivial standards-conforming programs that you can expect to run unmodified across implementations. Culturally the Common Lisp community also seems more interested in maintaining portability even when leaving the confines of the official standard, through the heavy use of compatibility layers like Bordeaux-Threads. The Scheme approach seems to be to just target a specific implementation, and share functionality across them on a case-by-case basis by porting libraries (which is sometimes trivial, and sometimes more involved). Hence CL has Quicklisp, while Scheme has a package repository per system.