So. I've been trying to learn Scheme, but the lack of a reference implementation has gotten me confused. I have installed scm, but I am still unsure. Therefore, so I must ask: What are the best Scheme implementations for a beginner? And what is this stalin thing I've been hearing about?
Name:
Anonymous2012-01-09 6:48
Scheme is a fountain of good design ideas whose apparent traditional purpose is to prove some shit, and later be the ad-hoc mechanism by which non retarded features get added to the other hairy ass looking lisps, and now mistaken by newbs to be an actual language, when its actually more like the united lisp-1 languages of america with gay rich liberal Schemes and redneck Schemes being stuck together to vote in the next Sussman. The newbs get confused about this `Scheme' federation thing and say fuck it and migrate to some other Lisp they found on Wikipedia, the rest who stuck around settled in with an implementation.
R5RS is the lisp version of brainfuck with the extra functionality of a full numeric tower, macros, eval, call/cc (not defined by that name though) and file IO. As I remember it has nothing specified about packages/libraries, nor does it specify anything that are considered bare facilities this decade like sockets, FFI and threads. Basically R5RS compliant applications can just do things like screen and file IO, apply lambdas and compute numbers.
R6RS was an attempt to make a non-brainfuck Scheme (imagine that, standard compliant applications that aren't fibs and fac), some people implemented R6RS (about a dozen of them), some people liked it (people who'd like the idea to write apps in Scheme, instead of Scheme compilers), some people didn't care, and some people (Chicken dude) got quite pissed about it for straying from some philosophy thing, and so R7RS will basically define two Schemes: a small and big one.