Scheme

Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, concentrating on the “functional” subset of Lisp that introduced lexical scoping, closures, and first class continuations. Originally developed by GeraldSussman and GuySteele, the language has a very concise and clear standard. The R5RS Scheme standard is about 50 pages, shorter than the index table of the Common Lisp specification.

It is widely used for teaching and research of programming language semantics, and was influential on the design of Common Lisp.

Implementations

There are dozens of implementations of Scheme including those below. See https://www.scheme.org/ and https://small.r7rs.org/wiki/ImplementationContrasts/ for longer lists.

• Chez Scheme – A Scheme currently maintained by Cisco Systems
• Chibi – Intended to be a small Scheme made to be a C extension language.
• Chicken – A compiler for R5RS and (soon) R7RS Scheme.
• Gauche – An R7RS Scheme intended to be a script interpreter.
• Guile – Guile Scheme is GNU’s official extension language.
• Ikarus – R6RS compiler.
• MIT/GNU Scheme – A Scheme that comes with an Emacs-like editor
• Racket

Built-in packages

• SchemeMode – major mode for editing Scheme
• CmuScheme – supports interacting with inferior Scheme processes
• ExScheme – supports interacting with inferior MitSlashGnuScheme processes
• InfoLook – Generic help look-up that supports Scheme Mode.

By default ‘M-x run-scheme’ runs a command from CmuScheme (ExScheme also defines ‘run-scheme’) which runs a Scheme REPL inside Emacs. This looks for a program name taken from ‘scheme-program-name’, scheme by default;you may change this to something like guile.

Other packages

• GaucheScheme
• Geiser – An advanced REPL that supports Guile and Racket.
• ikarus-script.el – Jump to source locations displayed in Ikarus error messages
• LspScheme - LanguageServerProtocol support for Scheme
• QuackMode – A Racket-focused extension that also supports other Schemes.
• RunSchemeHere allows you to easily run multiple inferior run-scheme processes.
• Scheme48Mode
• SchemeComplete – Provides R5RS and some SRFI symbol completion, and ElDoc support.
• SchemeLookup – Lookup R5RS symbol at point.
• SlimeMode – A Common Lisp REPL that handles rudimentary Scheme code.

See Also

• Lisp – The language of which Scheme is a dialect.
• GeraldSussman – Co-creator of Scheme
• GuySteele – Co-creator of Scheme
• EdWin – An Emacsen written in Scheme, included in MIT Scheme
• SICP – An infamous book on computer programming.

External Links

• Official Website
• czscm – Scheme interpreter in ELisp by NoahFriedman.
• Lisp:sie.el – Scheme In Emacs, a Scheme-like interpreter implemented in ELisp, written by KalleOlaviNiemitalo, which see.

CategoryProgramming