Re: Scheme programming pointers

[David Kastrup]

Karlin High <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 6:39 PM, Chris Yate <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> https://scheme-book.ursliska.de
>>
>> However, this is an area where Scheme is quite different from other
>> languages
>
> The times I've looked at Scheme, I got the impression that it works
> more like spreadsheet formulas that just "calculate" rather than other
> programming languages that "run." Is that anywhere near correct?

It is a functional language, like Lisp.  However, this mainly means that
you don't have a programming language as much as that you enter parse
trees as list-like data structures for programming.

The programming idioms preferred in Scheme over those in Lisp are of a
more functional and recursive manner as well and try to avoid side
effects more than those typical for Lisp.

That makes it suited for spreadsheet-like tasks and makes the typical
use cases functionally functional rather than just syntactically so.

It is not actually an ingrained part of the language but rather of its
preferred (and thus also supported) use patterns.

-- 
David Kastrup