Scheme is a minimal LISP dialect. More information can be found at http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/projects/scheme/ and by reading the section on functional programming on the ProgrammingLanguage page.

Some intertesting facts about Scheme can be found in the paper The Evolution of Lisp. For instance, Scheme was originally named "Schemer", but because of the 6-character limitation of file names in the operating system ITS that was being used, (this was 1975 after all) it was truncated to Scheme and "the name stuck." Scheme was originally a toy implementation of ideas published earlier by someone called Carl Hewitt; it was written as "an attempt by Gerald Jay Sussman and Steele during Autumn 1975 to explicate for themselves some aspects of Carl Hewitt's theory of actors as a model of computation."

The specification for the scheme language is shorter than the index to the specification of CommonLISP, which is a pretty good reflection on their relative sizes.

Interesting Links

• Schemers.org
• OpenGL bindings for Scheme
• Teach yourself Scheme in fixnum days. -- very good Scheme introduction.
• Advanced Scheme bits -- continuations and hygenic macros explained
• A Call/CC Page -- call-with-current-continuation explained
• The SRFI repository -- Scheme extensions
• The R5RS Report -- the latest Scheme language spec
• The SLIB Scheme library -- Portable library for Scheme implementations
• A Scheme Comprehensive Archive Network (CSAN) -- The starting of a CSAN at the beginning of 2004

Implementations

• Gauche Scheme -- nice Scheme implementation
• scsh, Scheme as a Unix shell
• DrScheme, an educational Scheme with an IDE and many tools
• MzScheme -- a Scheme compiler to byte code and native code
• Bigloo Scheme -- compile Scheme to native code or Java class files
• Guile -- designed to be embedded in C programs
• LispMe -- Scheme interpreter for PalmOS devices

CategoryProgrammingLanguages CategoryFunctionalProgrammingLanguages