New Scheme Draft Released

Scheme has always had a special place in the Dr. Dobb's annals. (That's "Scheme," as in a minimalist programming language that's a dialect of Lisp, not "scheme" as in figuring out how to get spare change from your pocket to mine.)

Maybe it's because XScheme, a popular and elegant implementation of Scheme, was written by former Dr. Dobb's technical editor David Betz. Of course, XScheme was only one of several languages David contributed to the open source community years ago. There was also XLisp, Bob, DROOL, AdSys, and others. But it's XScheme which stands out in my mind. If you want to find out more about XScheme, you can download the source code to it here.

Or maybe it is because of the conversations and interaction that Dr. Dobb's has had over years with Scheme's co-author Guy L. Steele Jr. Developed by Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman in the 1970s, Scheme was introduced via a series of now-famous papers known as the "Lambda Papers." You can also glean a lot about Scheme in particular, and programming languages in general, from Guy Steele's article "Thoughts on Language Design" and an interview entitled "A Conversation with Guy Steele". I'd also like to point out that Guy Steele Jr., in addition to being a Sun Fellow, Distinguished Engineer, and Principal Investigator at Sun Microsystems Labs, is a recipient of Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award.

The point of all this is that a new draft of the Scheme standard has been released by the Scheme workshop. After four or five years in the making, R6RS is now available for your review and public comment. The six-month public comment period is now open and continues until March 15, 2007. Congratulations to the steering committee and all others who worked hard to get this draft out. A job well done.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:42 AM  Permalink