
Home Page: http://www.gnu.org/software/mit-scheme/
MIT/GNU Scheme is an implementation of the Scheme™ programming language, providing an interpreter, compiler, source-code debugger, integrated Emacs™-like editor, and a large run-time library. It is best suited to programming large applications with a rapid development cycle. MIT/GNU Scheme is at version 9.1.1 and is under the GPL™.
The MIT™ home page of the Scheme™ language is here . Scheme™ is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp™ programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have exceptionally clear and simple semantics and a few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms — including imperative, functional, and message passing styles — find convenient expression in Scheme™.
Note
Scheme™ was one of the first programming languages to incorporate first class procedures as in the lambda calculus, thereby proving the usefulness of static scope rules and block structure in a dynamically typed language. Scheme™ was the first major dialect of Lisp™ to distinguish procedures from lambda expressions and symbols, to use a single lexical environment for all variables, and to evaluate the operator position of a procedure call in the same way as an operand position. By relying entirely on procedure calls to express iteration, Scheme™ emphasized the fact that tail-recursive procedure calls are essentially goto's that pass arguments. Scheme™ was the first widely used programming language to embrace first class escape procedures, from which all previously known sequential control structures can be synthesized. More recently, building upon the design of generic arithmetic in Common Lisp™, Scheme™ introduced the concept of exact and inexact numbers. Scheme™ is also the first programming language to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a block-structured language to be extended reliably.