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Sussman had studied ALGOL, and some aspects of PLASMA's modeling suggested to him that the use of lexical scope would greatly simplify the creation of actors and closures. Their modeling system went well and they called it Schemer, eventually changing it to Scheme to fit the six-character limit on the ITS file system on their DEC PDP-10. They soon concluded that actors were essentially closures that never return but instead invoke a [[continuation]], and thus they decided that the closure and the actor were, for the purposes of their investigation, essentially identical concepts. They eliminated what they regarded as redundant code and, at that point, discovered that they had written a very small and capable dialect of Lisp
25 years later, in 1998, Sussman and Steele reflected that the minimalism of Scheme was not a conscious design goal, but rather the unintended outcome of the design process. "We were actually trying to build something complicated and discovered, serendipitously, that we had accidentally designed something that met all our goals but was much simpler than we had intended..we realized that the lambda calculus--a small, simple formalism—could serve as the core of a powerful and expressive programming language." <ref name="revisited"/>
==The Lambda Papers==
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