History of the Scheme programming language: Difference between revisions

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The '''history of the [[Scheme (programming language)|Scheme]] programming language''' begins with the development of earlier members of the [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] family of languages during second half of the twentieth century, the process of design and development during which language designers [[Guy L. Steele]] and [[Gerald Jay Sussman]] released an influential series of MIT [[AI Memo]]s known as the ''Lambda Papers'' (1975-1980), the growth in popularity of the language, and the era of standardization (1990 onwards). Much of the history of Scheme has been documented by the developers themselves.<ref name="steele_history">Guy Steele, 2006, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, [http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/JAOO-SchemeHistory-2006public.pdf History of Scheme] (slideshow, PDF)</ref>

==Prehistory==

The development of Scheme was heavily influenced by two predecessors that were quite different from one another: [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] provided its general semantics and syntax, and [[ALGOL]] provided its [[scope (programming)|lexical scope]] and block structure. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp but Lisp has evolved; the Lisp dialects from which Scheme evolved--althoughevolved—although they were in the mainstream at the time--weretime—were quite different from any modern Lisp.

===Lisp===

{{details|Lisp (programming language)}}

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==Carl Hewitt, the Actor model, and the birth of Scheme==

{{seealsoSee also|Actor model|Planner (programming language)|MDL (programming language)}}

In 1973 [[Carl Hewitt]] of MIT, along with his collaborators Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger, published their work on the Actor model, which they were developing as a means of programming concurrent systems. <ref name="hewitt1973">{{cite paper|author=Carl Hewitt|coauthors=Peter Bishop and Richard Steiger|title=A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence|publisher=IJCAI|year=1973}}</ref> In 1970, Sussman and Hewitt had worked together along with others on [[MDL (programming language)|Muddle (later MDL)]], an extended Lisp which formed a component of Hewitt's ambitious [[Planner (programming language)|Planner]] project, and in 1971 Sussman, [[Drew McDermott]], and [[Eugene Charniak]] had developed a system called Micro-Planner which was a partial and somewhat unsatisfactory implementation of Planner. Drew McDermott, and Sussman in 1972 developed the Lisp-based language Conniver, which revised the use of automatic backtracking in Planner which they thought was unproductive.

Meanwhile Hewitt worked on Planner-73, later called PLASMA, which was also written in Lisp and embodied his newly developed ideas which formed the [[Actor model]]. Steele, then a graduate student at MIT, had been following these developments, and he and Sussman decided to implement a version of the Actor model in their own "tiny Lisp" developed on top of [[MacLisp]], in order to understand the model better. Using this basis they then began to develop mechanisms for creating actors and sending messages. <ref name="revisited">{{cite journal

| author = [[Gerald Jay Sussman]] and [[Guy L. Steele, Jr.]]

| month = December

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==References==

<references/>

[[Category:Scheme programming language]]