Faculty of Engineering
Institute of Computer Science
in the Faculty of Engineering of Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel

Scheme


Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.

Scheme was one of the first programming languages to incorporate first class procedures as in the lambda calculus, thereby proving the usefulness of static scope rules and block structure in a dynamically typed language. Scheme was the first major dialect of Lisp to distinguish procedures from lambda expressions and symbols, to use a single lexical environment for all variables, and to evaluate the operator position of a procedure call in the same way as an operand position. By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration, Scheme emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are essentially goto's that pass arguments. Scheme was the first widely used programming language to embrace first class escape procedures, from which all previously known sequential control structures can be synthesized. More recently, building upon the design of generic arithmetic in Common Lisp, Scheme introduced the concept of exact and inexact numbers.

Scheme recently became the first programming language to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a block-structured language to be extended reliably.

To start DrScheme on a SUN workstation at the Institute of Computer Science, you have to start the program with

    /home/scheme/bin/drscheme

Please send any comments and bug reports to:

Michael Hanus, e-mail: mh@informatik.uni-kiel.de

Institut für Informatik
Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel
D-24098 Kiel, Germany


Michael Hanus
Last modified: Thu Mar 4 09:51:25 MET 2010