R5Rs
Scheme Revised(5) Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme

Richard Kelsey, William Clinger, and Jonathan Rees (Editors)
H. Abelson | R. K. Dybvig | C. T. Haynes
G. J. Rozas | N. I. Adams IV | D. P. Friedman
E. Kohlbecker | G. L. Steele Jr. | D. H. Bartley
R. Halstead | D. Oxley | G. J. Sussman
G. Brooks | C. Hanson | K. M. Pitman
M. Wand | Dedicated to the Memory of Robert Hieb

Chapters

| Summary
| Introduction
1. | Table of contents
2. | Overview of Scheme
3. | Lexical conventions
4. | Basic concepts
5. | Expressions
6. | Program structure
7. | Standard procedures
8. | Formal syntax and semantics
9. | Concepts
10. | Variables and Procedures
| Notes
| Additional material
| Example
| Bibliography

Summary

The report gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. 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 an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.
The introduction offers a brief history of the language and of the report.
The first three chapters present the fundamental ideas of the language and describe the notational conventions used for describing the language and for writing programs in the language.
Chapters Expressions and Program structure describe the syntax and semantics of expressions, programs, and definitions.
Chapter Standard procedures describes Scheme's built-in procedures, which include all of the language's data manipulation and input/output primitives.
Chapter Formal syntax and semantics provides a formal syntax for Scheme written in extended BNF, along with a formal denotational semantics. An example of the use of the language follows the formal syntax and semantics.
The report concludes with a list of references and an alphabetic index.

Introduction

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. Scheme demonstrates that a very small number of rules for forming expressions, with no restrictions on how they are composed, suffice to form a practical and efficient programming language that is flexible enough to support most of the major programming paradigms in use today.
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. A subsequent version of Scheme introduced the concept of exact and inexact numbers, an extension of Common Lisp's generic arithmetic. More recently, Scheme became the first programming language to support hygienic macros, which permit the syntax of a block-structured language to be extended in a consistent and reliable manner.

Background

The first description of Scheme was written in 1975 [Scheme75]. A revised report [Scheme78] appeared in 1978, which described the evolution of the language as its MIT implementation was upgraded to support an innovative compiler [Rabbit]. Three distinct projects began in 1981 and 1982 to use variants of Scheme for courses at MIT, Yale, and Indiana University [Rees82], [MITScheme], [Scheme311]. An introductory computer science textbook using Scheme was published in 1984 [SICP].
As Scheme became more widespread, local dialects began to diverge until students and researchers occasionally found it difficult to understand code written at other sites. Fifteen representatives of the major implementations of Scheme therefore met in October 1984 to work toward a better and more widely accepted standard for Scheme. Their report [RRRS] was published at MIT and Indiana University in the summer of 1985. Further revision took place in the spring of 1986 [R3RS], and in the spring of 1988 [R4RS]. The present report reflects further revisions agreed upon in a meeting at Xerox PARC in June 1992.
We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part without fee. In particular, we encourage implementors of Scheme to use this report as a starting point for manuals and other documentation, modifying it as necessary.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people for their help: Alan Bawden, Michael Blair, George Carrette, Andy Cromarty, Pavel Curtis, Jeff Dalton, Olivier Danvy, Ken Dickey, Bruce Duba, Marc Feeley, Andy Freeman, Richard Gabriel, Yekta G"ursel, Ken Haase, Robert Hieb, Paul Hudak, Morry Katz, Chris Lindblad, Mark Meyer, Jim Miller, Jim Philbin, John Ramsdell, Mike Shaff, Jonathan Shapiro, Julie Sussman, Perry Wagle, Daniel Weise, Henry Wu, and Ozan Yigit. We thank Carol Fessenden, Daniel Friedman, and Christopher Haynes for permission to use text from the Scheme 311 version 4 reference manual. We thank Texas Instruments, Inc. for permission to use text from the TI Scheme Language Reference Manual[TImanual85]. We gladly acknowledge the influence of manuals for MIT Scheme[MITScheme], T[Rees84], Scheme 84[Scheme84],Common Lisp[CLtL], and Algol 60[Naur63].
We also thank Betty Dexter for the extreme effort she put into setting this report in TeX, and Donald Knuth for designing the program that caused her troubles.
The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Computer Science Department of Indiana University, the Computer and Information Sciences Department of the University of Oregon, and the NEC Research Institute supported the preparation of this report. Support for the MIT work was provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-80-C-0505. Support for the Indiana University work was provided by NSF grants NCS 83-04567 and NCS 83-03325.

Notes

Language changes

This section enumerates the changes that have been made to Scheme since the ``Revised^4 report'' [R4RS] was published.

- The report is now a superset of the IEEE standard for Scheme [IEEEScheme]: implementations that conform to the report will also conform to the standard. This required the following changes:
  - The empty list is now required to count as true.
  - The classification of features as essential or inessential has been removed. There are now three classes of built-in procedures: primitive, library, and optional. The optional procedures are `load`, `with-input-from-file`, `with-output-to-file`, `transcript-on`, `transcript-off`, and `interaction-environment`, and `-` and `/` with more than two arguments. None of these are in the IEEE standard.
  - Programs are allowed to redefine built-in procedures. Doing so will not change the behavior of other built-in procedures.
- Port has been added to the list of disjoint types.
- The macro appendix has been removed. High-level macros are now part of the main body of the report. The rewrite rules for derived expressions have been replaced with macro definitions. There are no reserved identifiers.
- `Syntax-rules` now allows vector patterns.
- Multiple-value returns, `eval`, and `dynamic-wind` have been added.
- The calls that are required to be implemented in a properly tail-recursive fashion are defined explicitly.
- ``@`' can be used within identifiers. ``|`' is reserved for possible future extensions.

Additional material

The Internet Scheme Repository at: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository/
contains an extensive Scheme bibliography, as well as papers, programs, implementations, and other material related to Scheme.

Example

`Integrate-system` integrates the system
y'k = fk(y1, y2, ..., yn), k = 1, ..., n
of differential equations with the method of Runge-Kutta.
The parameter `system-derivative` is a function that takes a system state (a vector of values for the state variables y1, ..., yn) and produces a system derivative (the values y'1, ..., y'n). The parameter `initial-state` provides an initial system state, and `h` is an initial guess for the length of the integration step.
The value returned by `integrate-system` is an infinite stream of system states.

    (define integrate-system
      (lambda (system-derivative initial-state h)
        (let ((next (runge-kutta-4 system-derivative h)))
          (letrec ((states
                    (cons initial-state
                          (delay (map-streams next
                                              states)))))
            states))))

`Runge-Kutta-4` takes a function, `f`, that produces a system derivative from a system state. `Runge-Kutta-4` produces a function that takes a system state and produces a new system state.

    (define runge-kutta-4
      (lambda (f h)
        (let ((*h (scale-vector h))
              (*2 (scale-vector 2))
              (*1/2 (scale-vector (/ 1 2)))
              (*1/6 (scale-vector (/ 1 6))))
          (lambda (y)
            ;; y is a system state
            (let* ((k0 (*h (f y)))
                   (k1 (*h (f (add-vectors y (*1/2 k0)))))
                   (k2 (*h (f (add-vectors y (*1/2 k1)))))
                   (k3 (*h (f (add-vectors y k2)))))
              (add-vectors y
                (*1/6 (add-vectors k0
                                   (*2 k1)
                                   (*2 k2)
                                   k3))))))))

    (define elementwise
      (lambda (f)
        (lambda vectors
          (generate-vector
            (vector-length (car vectors))
            (lambda (i)
              (apply f
                     (map (lambda (v) (vector-ref  v i))
                          vectors)))))))

    (define generate-vector
      (lambda (size proc)
        (let ((ans (make-vector size)))
          (letrec ((loop
                    (lambda (i)
                      (cond ((= i size) ans)
                            (else
                             (vector-set! ans i (proc i))
                             (loop (+ i 1)))))))
            (loop 0)))))

    (define add-vectors (elementwise +))

    (define scale-vector
      (lambda (s)
        (elementwise (lambda (x) (* x s)))))

`Map-streams` is analogous to `map`: it applies its first argument (a procedure) to all the elements of its second argument (a stream).

    (define map-streams
      (lambda (f s)
        (cons (f (head s))
              (delay (map-streams f (tail s))))))

Infinite streams are implemented as pairs whose car holds the first element of the stream and whose cdr holds a promise to deliver the rest of the stream.

    (define head car)
    (define tail
      (lambda (stream) (force (cdr stream))))

The following illustrates the use of `integrate-system` in integrating the system
C dvC / dt = -iL - vC / R
L diL / dt = vC
which models a damped oscillator.

    (define damped-oscillator
      (lambda (R L C)
        (lambda (state)
          (let ((Vc (vector-ref state 0))
                (Il (vector-ref state 1)))
            (vector (- 0 (+ (/ Vc (* R C)) (/ Il C)))
                    (/ Vc L))))))

    (define the-states
      (integrate-system
         (damped-oscillator 10000 1000 .001)
         '#(1 0)
         .01))

Bibliography

- [SICP] Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, second edition. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996.
- [Bawden88] Alan Bawden and Jonathan Rees. Syntactic closures. In Proceedings of the 1988 ACM Symposium on Lisp and Functional Programming, pages 86--95.
- [howtoprint] Robert G. Burger and R. Kent Dybvig. Printing floating-point numbers quickly and accurately. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '96 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 108--116.
- [RRRS] William Clinger, editor. The revised revised report on Scheme, or an uncommon Lisp. MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 848, August 1985. Also published as Computer Science Department Technical Report 174, Indiana University, June 1985.
- [howtoread] William Clinger. How to read floating point numbers accurately. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN '90 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 92--101. Proceedings published as SIGPLAN Notices 25(6), June 1990.
- [R4RS] William Clinger and Jonathan Rees, editors. The revised^4 report on the algorithmic language Scheme. In ACM Lisp Pointers 4(3), pages 1--55, 1991.
- [macrosthatwork] William Clinger and Jonathan Rees. Macros that work. In Proceedings of the 1991 ACM Conference on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 155--162.
- [propertailrecursion] William Clinger. Proper Tail Recursion and Space Efficiency. To appear in Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June 1998.
- [syntacticabstraction] R. Kent Dybvig, Robert Hieb, and Carl Bruggeman. Syntactic abstraction in Scheme. Lisp and Symbolic Computation 5(4):295--326, 1993.
- [Scheme311] Carol Fessenden, William Clinger, Daniel P. Friedman, and Christopher Haynes. Scheme 311 version 4 reference manual. Indiana University Computer Science Technical Report 137, February 1983. Superseded by [Scheme84].
- [Scheme84] D. Friedman, C. Haynes, E. Kohlbecker, and M. Wand. Scheme 84 interim reference manual. Indiana University Computer Science Technical Report 153, January 1985.
- [IEEE] IEEE Standard 754-1985. IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic. IEEE, New York, 1985.
- [IEEEScheme] IEEE Standard 1178-1990. IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language. IEEE, New York, 1991.
- [Kohlbecker86] Eugene E. Kohlbecker Jr. Syntactic Extensions in the Programming Language Lisp. PhD thesis, Indiana University, August 1986.
- [hygienic] Eugene E. Kohlbecker Jr., Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen, and Bruce Duba. Hygienic macro expansion. In Proceedings of the 1986 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, pages 151--161.
- [Landin65] Peter Landin. A correspondence between Algol 60 and Church's lambda notation: Part I. Communications of the ACM 8(2):89--101, February 1965.
- [MITScheme] MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Scheme manual, seventh edition. September 1984.
- [Naur63] Peter Naur et al. Revised report on the algorithmic language Algol 60. Communications of the ACM 6(1):1--17, January 1963.
- [Penfield81] Paul Penfield, Jr. Principal values and branch cuts in complex APL. In APL '81 Conference Proceedings, pages 248--256. ACM SIGAPL, San Francisco, September 1981. Proceedings published as APL Quote Quad 12(1), ACM, September 1981.
- [Pitman83] Kent M. Pitman. The revised MacLisp manual (Saturday evening edition). MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report 295, May 1983.
- [Rees82] Jonathan A. Rees and Norman I. Adams IV. T: A dialect of Lisp or, lambda: The ultimate software tool. In Conference Record of the 1982 ACM Symposium on Lisp and Functional Programming, pages 114--122.
- [Rees84] Jonathan A. Rees, Norman I. Adams IV, and James R. Meehan. The T manual, fourth edition. Yale University Computer Science Department, January 1984.
- [R3RS] Jonathan Rees and William Clinger, editors. The revised^3 report on the algorithmic language Scheme. In ACM SIGPLAN Notices 21(12), pages 37--79, December 1986.
- [Reynolds72] John Reynolds. Definitional interpreters for higher order programming languages. In ACM Conference Proceedings, pages 717--740. ACM, 1972.
- [Scheme78] Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. The revised report on Scheme, a dialect of Lisp. MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 452, January 1978.
- [Rabbit] Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Rabbit: a compiler for Scheme. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report 474, May 1978.
- [CLtL] Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Common Lisp: The Language, second edition. Digital Press, Burlington MA, 1990.
- [Scheme75] Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Lewis Steele Jr. Scheme: an interpreter for extended lambda calculus. MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 349, December 1975.
- [Stoy77] Joseph E. Stoy. Denotational Semantics: The Scott-Strachey Approach to Programming Language Theory. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1977.
- [TImanual85] Texas Instruments, Inc. TI Scheme Language Reference Manual. Preliminary version 1.0, November 1985.

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