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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 the influential [[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 lexical scope.
===Lisp===
Lisp was invented by [[John McCarthy (computer scientist)|John McCarthy]] in 1958 while he was at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]] (MIT). McCarthy published its design in a paper in ''[[Communications of the ACM]]'' in 1960, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I"<ref name="MCCARTHY">{{cite web | title=Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I| author=John McCarthy | url=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.html | accessdate=2006-10-13}}</ref> ("Part II" was never published). He showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a [[Turing-complete]] language for algorithms.
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The two variants of Lisp most significant in the developement of Scheme were both developed at MIT: LISP 1.5<ref>{{cite book | url = http://community.computerhistory.org/scc/projects/LISP/book/LISP%201.5%20Programmers%20Manual.pdf | title = LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual | publisher = [[MIT Press]] | first1 = John | last1 = McCarthy | first2 = Paul W. | last2 = Abrahams | first3 = Daniel J. | last3 = Edwards | first4 = Timothy P. | last4 = Hart | first5 = Michael I. | last5 = Levin | isbn = 0 262 130 1 1 4 | year = 1985}}</ref> developed by McCarthy and others at MIT, and [[Maclisp|MACLISP]]<ref>{{cite web | url = http://zane.brouhaha.com/~healyzh/doc/lisp.doc.txt | title = Maclisp Reference Manual | date = March 3, 1979 | archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20071214064433/http://zane.brouhaha.com/~healyzh/doc/lisp.doc.txt | archivedate = 2007-12-14}}</ref> – developed for MIT's [[Project MAC]], a direct descendant of LISP 1.5. which ran on the PDP-10 and [[Multics]] systems.
Since its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the [[artificial intelligence]] research community, especially on [[PDP-10]]<ref>The 36-bit word size of the [[PDP-6]]/[[PDP-10]] was influenced by the usefulness of having two Lisp 18-bit pointers in a single word. {{cite newsgroup | quote = The PDP-6 project started in early 1963, as a 24-bit machine. It grew to 36 bits for LISP, a design goal. | url = http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.computers/browse_thread/thread/6e5602ce733d0ec/17597705ae289112 | title = The History of TOPS or Life in the Fast ACs | newsgroup = alt.folklore.computers | id = 84950@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu | date = 18 October 1990 | author = Peter J. Hurley}}</ref> systems. Lisp was used as the implementation of the programming language [[Planner programming language|Micro Planner]] that was the foundation for the famous AI system [[SHRDLU]].
===ALGOL===
ALGOL 58. originally to be called IAL for "International Algorithmic Language", was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at [[ETH Zurich]] (cf. [[ALGOL 58]]). ALGOL 60, a later revision developed at the ALGOL 60 meeting in Paris became the standard for the publication of algorithms and had a profound effect on future language development, despite the language's lack of commercial success and its limitations. [[C. A. R. Hoare]] has remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors."<ref>[http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~bchandra/courses/papers/Hoare_Hints.pdf "Hints on Programming Language Design"], C.A.R. Hoare, December 1973. Page 27. (This statement is sometimes erroneously attributed to [[Edsger W. Dijkstra]], also involved in implementing the first ALGOL 60 [[compiler]].)</ref>
== Origin ==
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