Sitaram D. Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days

Dorai Sitaram, 2004. — 132 p.Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days is an introductory book by Dorai Sitaram on the Scheme programming language using the Racket Scheme implementation. The text is outdated in several parts, including its introduction to macros using an unhygienic macro system.Scheme is a functional programming language and one of the two main dialects of the programming language Lisp. Unlike Common Lisp, the other main dialect, Scheme follows a minimalist design philosophy specifying a small standard core with powerful tools for language extension.Scheme was developed at the MIT AI Lab by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman who introduced it to the academic world via a series of memos, now referred to as the Lambda Papers, over the period 1975–1980. It was the first dialect of Lisp to choose lexical scope and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization, giving stronger support for functional programming and associated techniques such as recursive algorithms. It was also one of the first programming languages to support first-class continuations. It had a significant influence on the effort that led to the development of Common Lisp.