History of the Scheme programming language: Difference between revisions

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

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. Micro-Planner would later form a basis for the famous [[SHRDLU]] system. 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