How to use Scheme on itlabs.umn.edu or cs.umn.edu machines

• To use STk from your Itlabs or CS account you need to do
  1. type module load soft/tcl/8.3.1
  2. type stk
  
  From STk you can access the Tk toolkit to do graphics. To get the gui you need to use "stk -console".
  You can use a set of drawing procedures for STk, gdraw.stk, to simplify considerably the use of Tk. More information on STk and the drawing procedures can be found later in this page.
• To use MIT Scheme you need to type scheme .

Information about the Scheme language

• The Web page for Abelson and Sussman book - It includes the source code from the book and the entire text.

  You might find useful to copy the source code of all the examples from the textbook and use it for practice. The code is divided by chapter as follows: ch1.scm, ch2.scm, and ch3.scm. The files ch2support.scm and ch3support.scm contain procedures from other chapters that are needed to run the examples. The file ch2tests.scm shows examples of calling some of the procedures in Chapter 2. Enjoy!

• Watch at a collection of video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman on Scheme.
• R5RS (html) and (pdf) - The revised (five times) Scheme report. This is the best place to find a precise description of all the system defined procedures in Scheme and of the Scheme standards.
• SchemeQuickRef - A short list of the standard scheme procedures. Convenient and handy to find out the system defined procedures.
• An entire book on Scheme, The Scheme Programming Language by R. Kent Dybvig is available on line. A good way of finding out what the system defined procedures are.
• Another complete book on line An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation, by Paul Wilson. It includes a tutorial on Scheme and describes how to implement Scheme.

STk

• Detailed step-by-step instructions on how to use STk with Microsoft Windows
• Setting up emacs to run scheme
• The STk reference manual (108 pages)
• Using graphics in STk
  • gdraw.stk - Set of drawing functions for STk
  • gdraw brief tutorial
  • You can draw really nice environment diagrams from STk, by using (only on the ITlabs machines running Solaris) ~boley/stk/runenvdraw
  • show-move.stk A demonstration of graphically moving text with the mouse.
  • InheritanceFull.stk A simple inheritance example, with graphics.
• Init.stk An init file for STk with a variety of goodies

Where is Scheme/Lisp used and why

• SchemeIntro.txt - A short paper on why to use Scheme. Easy reading, good motivations.
• Scheme Uses - A short list of where Scheme is actually used in the real world.
• Essays on Lisp:
  • The Roots of Lisp - a short paper by Paul Graham on the history of Lisp and what makes it different from other languages.
  • - A short essay by Paul Graham on The revenge of the Nerds. Paul Graham compares different languages and explains what makes Lisp powerful. He gives some insights on why Lisp was chosen to write the airline fare code that ITA licenses to Orbitz.
  • A Retrospective on Paradigms of AI Programming - by Peter Norvig. This article is a bit old but it includes a nice description of the unique features of Lisp and a comparison of the relative speed of Lisp, Java, Python, Perl, and C++.
• The computer language Shootout Benchmarks - benchmarks for many different languages, including Lisp, Scheme, Java, Pearl, Python and many more.
• MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, explains how the use of map and reduce (from Lisp) make algorithms at Google massively scalable.

Other (Free) Scheme implementations

• DrScheme. An interactive graphical environment for developing Scheme programs. Runs under Solaris. Linux, Unix, Windows, MacOS. Designed for education. Extremely easy of use. You need to be careful, since it is not sully compliant with r5 and includes extensions to the Scheme standard (threads, foreign function interface, modules, support for TCP, etc.) that do not exist in other implementations.
  
• UCB Scheme. Modified STk from Berkeley for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
  
• SCM An efficient implementation in C that runs on many platforms (Unix, MacOS, DOS, etc). Uses SLIB, a portable Scheme Library.
  
• Guile, GNU's Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extension. It is a library implementation of Scheme. Designed to be linked into applications to make it extensible.
• Gambit. Runs on the Mac (MacGambit), on Unix, and Windows (Gambit-C). "Gambit-C includes a Scheme interpreter and a Scheme compiler which can be used to build standalone executables. Because the compiler generates portable C code it is fairly easy to port to any platform with a decent C compiler. The thread system is very efficient and can support millions of concurrent processes."
  An efficient implementation in C that runs on many platforms (Unix, MacOS, DOS, etc).

• MIT/GNU Scheme Available for many platforms (linux, Windows, etc).
• KAWA - Kawa is a framework written in Java for implementing high-level and dynamic languages by compiling them to the Java Virtual Machine. Kawa is an implementation of Scheme.
  
• JScheme. A dialect of Scheme implemented in Java and with a simple interface to Java, which allows importing Java methods.
• SIOD - (Scheme in One Defun), a small implementation of Scheme for most platforms. It can call or be called by C. Not compliant with R4RS.
  
• Pocket Scheme - for Windows CE-powered Handheld and Palm-sized PCs.
  
• LispMe - A Scheme implementation for the Pilot PDA.
  

Scheme Repositories

Python for Lisp/Scheme programmers

• Python for Lisp Programmers, by Peter Norvig. A short comparison of the two languages and again a comparison of relative speed of Lisp vs other programming languages. Peter Norvig is the Director of Search Quality at Google, a very respected author of books on AI and Lisp, and an excellent Lisp programmer.
• The Python IAQ: Infrequently Answered Questions - More details on the differences of Lisp and Python.