Lambda Papers

The history of the Scheme programming language begins with the development of earlier members of the Lisp family of languages during second half of the twentieth century, the process of design and development during which language designers Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman released an influential series of MIT AI Memos known as the Lambda Papers (1975–1980), the growth in popularity of the language, and the era of standardization (1990 onwards). Much of the history of Scheme has been documented by the developers themselves.

The development of Scheme was heavily influenced by two predecessors that were quite different from one another: Lisp provided its general semantics and syntax, and ALGOL provided its lexical scope and block structure. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp but Lisp has evolved; the Lisp dialects from which Scheme evolved—although they were in the mainstream at the time—are quite different from any modern Lisp.

Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in a paper in Communications of the ACM in 1960, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" ("Part II" was never published). He showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms.

The use of S-expressions which characterize the syntax of Lisp was initially intended to be an interim measure pending the development of a language employing what McCarthy called "M-expressions". As an example, the M-expression car[cons[A,B]] is equivalent to the S-expression (car (cons A B)). S-expressions proved popular, however, and the many attempts to implement M-expressions failed to catch on.

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