Re: Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

From: Jeremy H. Brown (jhbrown_at_ai.mit.edu)
Date: 10/03/03 

Date: 03 Oct 2003 11:25:31 -0400

"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy@udel.edu> writes:
> Other Lispers posting here have gone to pains to state that Scheme is
> not a dialect of Lisp but a separate Lisp-like language. Could you
> give a short listing of the current main differences (S vs. CL)?

According to the "Revised(5) Report on the Algorithmic Language
Scheme", "Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive
dialect of the Lisp programming language..." It's certainly not a
dialect of Common Lisp, although it is one of CL's ancestors.

I'm sure if you do some web-groveling, you can find some substantial
comparisons of the two; I personally think they have more in common
than not. Here are a few of the (arguably) notable differences:

                        Scheme Common Lisp
Philosophy minimalism comprehensiveness
Namespaces one two (functions, variables)
Continuations yes no
Object system no yes
Exceptions no yes
Macro system syntax-rules defmacro
Implementations >10 ~4
Performance "worse" "better"
Standards IEEE ANSI
Reference name R5RS CLTL2
Reference length 50pp 1029pp
Standard libraries "few" "more"
Support Community Academic Applications writers

The Scheme community has the SRFI process for developing additional
almost-standards. I don't know if the CL community has something
equivalent; I don't think they did a year ago.

> If I were to decide to expand my knowledge be exploring the current
> versions of one(I've read the original SICP and LISP books), on what
> basis might I make a choice?

Try them both, see which one works for you in what you're doing.

Jeremy

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