[HN Gopher] Pre-scheme: A Scheme dialect for systems programming...
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       Pre-scheme: A Scheme dialect for systems programming (1997) [pdf]
        
       Author : tosh
       Score  : 64 points
       Date   : 2021-12-29 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (citeseerx.ist.psu.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (citeseerx.ist.psu.edu)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | tekknolagi wrote:
       | This is kind of like Slang for Smalltalk. Neat!
        
         | EdwardCoffin wrote:
         | I think pre-scheme predates Squeak though, so it would be more
         | like Slang is a kind of pre-scheme.
        
           | kragen wrote:
           | Kelsey's paper is from 01997 but I think Pre-Scheme itself is
           | from about 01993? Squeak came out in 01996 but I think had
           | been in development for a year or two. The Squeak paper also
           | came out in 01997.
        
             | eggy wrote:
             | OK,I'll bite. Why the leading zero before the four-digit
             | year?
        
               | lambdaba wrote:
               | Apparently it's to do with longnow.org and encouranging
               | long-term thinking.
        
             | EdwardCoffin wrote:
             | The earliest concrete evidence for pre-scheme I can find is
             | that version 0.52 of Scheme 48 (1998) has a prescheme
             | directory [1]. It lists a handful of releases going back as
             | far as 1986, though who knows at what point pre scheme was
             | introduced.
             | 
             | [1] https://www.s48.org/previous-releases.html
        
           | abecedarius wrote:
           | I remember when the Squeak paper came out I had the reaction,
           | "Oh, kind of like Pre-Scheme, why doesn't this mention it?"
           | (Maybe unfair: nobody can keep up with everything, and I
           | can't remember if Pre-Scheme had been documented at all.)
        
       | Syzygies wrote:
       | In that century, the term "prescheme" had a certain cachet in
       | mathematics. It wouldn't surprise me if the name choice for this
       | scheme dialect was in part a nod to the math term:
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(mathematics)
       | 
       | >In the early days, this was called a prescheme, and a scheme was
       | defined to be a separated prescheme. The term prescheme has
       | fallen out of use, but can still be found in older books, such as
       | Grothendieck's "Elements de geometrie algebrique" and Mumford's
       | "Red Book".
        
       | mumblemumble wrote:
       | It's fun to see this hit the front page.
       | 
       | For a while now I've toyed with the idea of trying to build a
       | Racket-like ecosystem on top of Pre-Scheme. I like the "language
       | playground" experience of Racket, but one thing that holds me
       | back from playing with it more is that it's tied to a fairly
       | heavyweight run-time. That makes it a bit more difficult to take
       | it some of the places I'd like to go with it.
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-29 23:01 UTC)