Revised5.92 Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme

The report gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme. The introduction offers a brief history of the language and of the report. It also gives a short introduction to the basic concepts of the language. Chapter 2 explains Scheme’s number types. Chapter 3 defines the read syntax of Scheme programs. Chapter 4 presents the fundamental semantic ideas of the language. Chapter 5 defines notational conventions used in the rest of the report. Chapters 6 and 7 describe libraries and top-level programs, the basic organizational units of Scheme programs. Chapter 8 explains the expansion process for Scheme code. Chapter 9 explains the Scheme base library which contains the fundamental forms useful to programmers. Appendix 10 provides a formal semantics for a core of Scheme. Appendix A contains definitions for some of the derived forms described in the report. The report concludes with a list of references and an alphabetic index. This report is accompanied by a report describing standard libraries [40]; references to this document are identified by designations such as “library section” or “library chapter”.