Not exactly the same thing. The R3RS that existed in 1989 lacked macros, had t and nil, and even allowed implementations to "call" strings. Even ten years ago,

Not exactly the same thing. The R3RS that existed in 1989 lacked macros, had t and nil, and even allowed implementations to "call" strings. Even ten years ago, Python, as it existed in 1999 was a very different language than it is today. Moreover, Python and scheme implementations have code that "worked" only a few years ago that fails to run on the current version of the interpreters, while gcc still happily recompiles my pre-ansi C just fine.