Community hub
Recent from talks
Contribute something to knowledge base
Content stats: 0 posts, 0 articles, 0 media, 0 notes
Members stats: 0 subscribers, 0 contributors, 0 moderators, 0 supporters
Subscribers
Supporters
Contributors
Moderators
Hub AI
History of the Scheme programming language AI simulator
(@History of the Scheme programming language_simulator)
Hub AI
History of the Scheme programming language AI simulator
(@History of the Scheme programming language_simulator)
History of the Scheme programming language
The history of the programming language Scheme begins with the development of earlier members of the Lisp family of languages during the second half of the twentieth century. During the design and development period of Scheme, language designers Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman released an influential series of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Memos known as the Lambda Papers (1975–1980). This resulted in the growth of popularity in the language and the era of standardization from 1990 onward. Much of the history of Scheme has been documented by the developers themselves.
The development of Scheme was heavily influenced by two predecessors that were quite different from one another: Lisp provided its general semantics and syntax, and ALGOL provided its lexical scope and block structure. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp but Lisp has evolved; the Lisp dialects from which Scheme evolved—although they were in the mainstream at the time—are quite different from any modern Lisp. Scheme falls within the large Lisp family of languages that includes Common Lisp, Scheme, ISLisp, EuLisp, XLisp, and AutoLisp.
Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in a paper in Communications of the ACM in 1960, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" (Part II was never published). He showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms.
The use of s-expressions which characterize the syntax of Lisp was initially intended to be an interim measure pending the development of a language employing what McCarthy called "m-expressions". As an example, the m-expression car[cons[A,B]] is equivalent to the s-expression (car (cons A B)). S-expressions proved popular, however, and the many attempts to implement m-expressions failed to catch on.
The first implementation of Lisp was on an IBM 704 by Steve Russell, who read McCarthy's paper and coded the eval function he described in machine code. The familiar (but puzzling to newcomers) names CAR and CDR used in Lisp to describe the head element of a list and its tail, evolved from two IBM 704 assembly language commands: Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decrement Register, each of which returned the contents of a 15-bit register corresponding to segments of a 36-bit IBM 704 instruction word.
The first complete Lisp compiler, written in Lisp, was implemented in 1962 by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT. This compiler introduced the Lisp model of incremental compilation, in which compiled and interpreted functions can intermix freely.
The two variants of Lisp most significant in the development of Scheme were both developed at MIT: LISP 1.5 developed by McCarthy and others, and Maclisp – developed for MIT's Project MAC, a direct descendant of LISP 1.5. which ran on the PDP-10 and Multics systems.
Since its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence (AI) research community, especially on PDP-10. The 36-bit word size of the PDP-6 and PDP-10 was influenced by the usefulness of having two Lisp 18-bit pointers in one word.
History of the Scheme programming language
The history of the programming language Scheme begins with the development of earlier members of the Lisp family of languages during the second half of the twentieth century. During the design and development period of Scheme, language designers Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman released an influential series of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) AI Memos known as the Lambda Papers (1975–1980). This resulted in the growth of popularity in the language and the era of standardization from 1990 onward. Much of the history of Scheme has been documented by the developers themselves.
The development of Scheme was heavily influenced by two predecessors that were quite different from one another: Lisp provided its general semantics and syntax, and ALGOL provided its lexical scope and block structure. Scheme is a dialect of Lisp but Lisp has evolved; the Lisp dialects from which Scheme evolved—although they were in the mainstream at the time—are quite different from any modern Lisp. Scheme falls within the large Lisp family of languages that includes Common Lisp, Scheme, ISLisp, EuLisp, XLisp, and AutoLisp.
Lisp was invented by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). McCarthy published its design in a paper in Communications of the ACM in 1960, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I" (Part II was never published). He showed that with a few simple operators and a notation for functions, one can build a Turing-complete language for algorithms.
The use of s-expressions which characterize the syntax of Lisp was initially intended to be an interim measure pending the development of a language employing what McCarthy called "m-expressions". As an example, the m-expression car[cons[A,B]] is equivalent to the s-expression (car (cons A B)). S-expressions proved popular, however, and the many attempts to implement m-expressions failed to catch on.
The first implementation of Lisp was on an IBM 704 by Steve Russell, who read McCarthy's paper and coded the eval function he described in machine code. The familiar (but puzzling to newcomers) names CAR and CDR used in Lisp to describe the head element of a list and its tail, evolved from two IBM 704 assembly language commands: Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decrement Register, each of which returned the contents of a 15-bit register corresponding to segments of a 36-bit IBM 704 instruction word.
The first complete Lisp compiler, written in Lisp, was implemented in 1962 by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT. This compiler introduced the Lisp model of incremental compilation, in which compiled and interpreted functions can intermix freely.
The two variants of Lisp most significant in the development of Scheme were both developed at MIT: LISP 1.5 developed by McCarthy and others, and Maclisp – developed for MIT's Project MAC, a direct descendant of LISP 1.5. which ran on the PDP-10 and Multics systems.
Since its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence (AI) research community, especially on PDP-10. The 36-bit word size of the PDP-6 and PDP-10 was influenced by the usefulness of having two Lisp 18-bit pointers in one word.