It doesn’t surprise me that it’s not a “cleaned up CL” — isn’t it older than CL? Though I suppose it’s less ossified so could have evolved to be “newer.”

Hard to say, really.  While the original Scheme development was in the late 1970s and the CL standardization effort didn't get going until a few years later, CL's roots are of course much older, and it was strongly influenced by Lisp Machine Lisp which was under development at about the same time as Scheme.  The situation is fuzzy enough that I think the best you can do is to call them roughly contemporaneous, with some cross-fertilization, notably in CL's lexical scoping.

I've never attempted any substantial development in Scheme, but have wondered whether I were missing anything, so Attila's observation is of interest.

-- Scott

On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 4:36 PM Don Morrison <dfm@ringing.org> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 6:10 PM Attila Lendvai attila.lendvai@gmail.com wrote:

scheme is not a cleaned up CL. it’s just another dialect.

It doesn’t surprise me that it’s not a “cleaned up CL” — isn’t it older than CL? Though I suppose it’s less ossified so could have evolved to be “newer.”



Don Morrison dfm@ringing.org
“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking
the rules. It’s people who follow orders.” – Banksy, Wall and Peace