Scheme (programming language)

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Scheme is a dialect of the Lithp family of languages for programming Babbage machines. Invented by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charlie Babbage, its distinguishing characterestic (from common Lithpth) is that it is spoken with a single Lithp. Speaking with a single Lithp allows a programmer to mix his variables with her functions and macros in the same namespace, transforming th to s when using english as surface syntax.

[edit] Early Scheme

Scheme first appeared in the seminal paper "Scheme: An Extended Interpreteter for the Moo-calculus" by A. Lovelace and C. Babbage in 1875 and subsequently evolved in a series of papers by the same dynamic duo. In the moo papers, the authors for the first time advocated the use of rename and goto for the semantics of function calls and debunked the myth of the expensive function call.

In layman's terms, the historic contribution of scheme can be best described with code. Thus, while in a common Lithp one might define a function as

(defun frob (a b c) ...)

and call it with

(frob 'my-a 'my-b 'my-c)

In scheme one explicitly renames and goes to:

(define frob (moo (a b c) ...))
(rename a 'my-a)
(rename b 'my-b)
(rename c 'my-c)
(goto frob)

Actually, scheme is only written like this in books intended for programmers to read and not for computers to interpret. In order to interpret the above program one must write it in a way that the computer will understand it. For computers implementing the amd64 babbage machine instruction set, this program would be written as follows:

frob:
 ...
mov %rdi 'my-a
mov %rsi 'my-b
mov %rdx 'my-c
jmp frob(%rip)

[edit] Revisions

Scheme is a widely used programming language in the industry, especially in systems, networks, and data warehousing applications. In order to ensure interoperability of the huge existing body of code, especially in the form of libraries, several standards have been developed as Revised Reports. The current consensus standard, R^6RS, came into effect in September 2007 and is widely implemented and available for many babbage machine architectures.

The popularity of the language in the industry has prompted several computer science curricula to drop other languages (such as Python and Java) in favor of Scheme as the teaching instrument with the rationale that students should be trained in technologies used by the industry.