6 Basic in Scheme

This chapter introduces some useful documents to help you understand Scheme language well. Feel free to come back here if you have any problem with Scheme syntax.

If expedient, read the section repeatedly.

Scheme was introduced in 1975 by Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. and was the first dialect of Lisp to fully support lexical scoping, first-class procedures, and continuations. In its earliest form it was a small language intended primarily for research and teaching, supporting only a handful of predefined syntactic forms and procedures. Scheme is now a complete general-purpose programming language, though it still derives its power from a small set of key concepts. Early implementations of the language were interpreter-based and slow, but Guile Scheme is trying to implement sophisticated compiler that generate better optimized code, and even a plan for AOT compiler generated native code in the future.