* Louis-Guillaume Gagnon <louis.guillaume.gag...@gmail.com> [2013-06-29 13:35:58 -0400]: > It's worth noting that the R5RS scheme standard is only ~50 pages > long: http://www.schemers.org/Documents/Standards/R5RS/ > In comparison, the C99 standard is ~550 pages. I would say that the > scheme dialect is pretty simple.
r5rs is much more limited in scope than c99, it has a synthetic design that provides the bare minimum to express high level computations, while c99 has an ugly pragmatic design, the result of long evolution and contradicting constraints the scheme spec does not give you enough semantics to reason about resource usage, latency of operations or to handle related failures, it cannot control the interaction with the underlying system without serious language extensions this is not a big problem for scheme as it is not a systems programming language, but a scripting language i think the lack of syntax in scheme helps understanding certain concepts (and makes the spec simpler), but is not comfortable in practice, a language like lua (with simple syntax for associative arrays) goes a long way to be more practical but the fundamental reason why we see more mention of c than lisp is that all relevant operating systems have a unix like api for which the only detailed spec is posix, a superset of c99, while a lisp implementation needs to do a lot to bridge the gap and its abstractions are leaky and costly but there is good news for those who think c is bad: there are emerging platforms which may give rise to different languages: jvm on mobile and enterprise systems and the web with js..