Talk:Scheme (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:41, 21 June 2005

Revision as of 21:19, 10 July 2005

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:I just cleaned up (IMHO!) the examples a little. What do you think now? --[[User:Fubar Obfusco|FOo]] 05:41, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

== Historical revisionism ==

Isn't the following claim in the 1st paragraph of the article (boldface mine) revisionist?

:''Scheme is a functional programming language and a dialect of Lisp. It was developed by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman in the 1970s '''initially as an attempt to understand the Actor model''' and introduced to the academic world via a series of papers now referred to as Sussman and Steele's Lambda Papers.''

From Structure and Interpretation of COmputer Programs, available online [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-7.html] the most complete historical account that I was able to find on a moment's notice follows:

:''Scheme, the dialect of Lisp that we use, is an attempt to bring together the power and elegance of Lisp and Algol. From Lisp we take the metalinguistic power that derives from the simple syntax, the uniform representation of programs as data objects, and the garbage-collected heap-allocated data. From Algol we take lexical scoping and block structure, which are gifts from the pioneers of programming-language design who were on the Algol committee. We wish to cite John Reynolds and Peter Landin for their insights into the relationship of Church's lambda calculus to the structure of programming languages. We also recognize our debt to the mathematicians who scouted out this territory decades before computers appeared on the scene. These pioneers include Alonzo Church, Barkley Rosser, Stephen Kleene, and Haskell Curry.''

I have been unable to document the claim that [[scheme]] is in some way indebted to the [[actor model]] (I have two refereneces Kent Dybvig's book and Abelson and Sussman. I find the claim strange, since I have used scheme and T and recognize its heritage, but the actor model I didn't think was one of the predecessors, particularly of such prominence. I will believe the claim, however, if someone provides a reference. --[[User:CSTAR|CSTAR]] 21:19, 10 July 2005 (UTC)