The Play's the Thing: A Whole Language Approach to Learning English

While Common Lisp supplanted most of the dialects it's descended from, it isn't the only remaining Lisp dialect, and depending on where and when you were exposed to Lisp, you may very well have learned one of these other dialects. Other than Common Lisp, the one general-purpose Lisp dialect that still has an active user community is Scheme. Common Lisp borrowed a few important features from Scheme but never intended to replace it. Originally designed at M.I.T., where it was quickly put to use as a teaching language for undergraduate computer science courses, Scheme has always been aimed at a different language niche than Common Lisp. In particular, Scheme's designers have focused on keeping the core language as small and as simple as possible. This has obvious benefits for a teaching language and also for programming language researchers who like to be able to formally prove things about languages. It also has the benefit of making it relatively easy to understand the whole language as specified in the standard ...»