(r5rs.info.gz) Introduction

 
 Introduction
 ************

 
* Background
* Acknowledgements
 
 Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of
 feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make
 additional features appear necessary.  Scheme demonstrates that a very
 small number of rules for forming expressions, with no restrictions on
 how they are composed, suffice to form a practical and efficient
 programming language that is flexible enough to support most of the
 major programming paradigms in use today.
 
 Scheme was one of the first programming languages to incorporate first
 class procedures as in the lambda calculus, thereby proving the
 usefulness of static scope rules and block structure in a dynamically
 typed language.  Scheme was the first major dialect of Lisp to
 distinguish procedures from lambda expressions and symbols, to use a
 single lexical environment for all variables, and to evaluate the
 operator position of a procedure call in the same way as an operand
 position.  By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration,
 Scheme emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are
 essentially goto's that pass arguments.  Scheme was the first widely
 used programming language to embrace first class escape procedures,
 from which all previously known sequential control structures can be
 synthesized.  A subsequent version of Scheme introduced the concept of
 exact and inexact numbers, an extension of Common Lisp's generic
 arithmetic.  More recently, Scheme became the first programming
 language to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a
 block-structured language to be extended in a consistent and reliable
 manner.

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