Pre-scheme: A Scheme dialect for systems programming (1997) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Pre-scheme: A Scheme dialect for systems programming (1997) [pdf]

citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

78 pointstosh12 comments

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 "Éléments de géométrie algébrique" and Mumford's "Red Book".

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.

This is kind of like Slang for Smalltalk. Neat!

I think pre-scheme predates Squeak though, so it would be more like Slang is a kind of pre-scheme.

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.

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

OK,I'll bite. Why the leading zero before the four-digit year?

Apparently it's to do with longnow.org and encouranging long-term thinking.

It's a poor choice in a many programming related contexts. To me, it looks like a malformed octal constant.

Hey, in K&R C, 8 and 9 are valid octal digits. But these are decimal years based on Dionysius Exiguus's miscalculations.

Funny, I followed longnow for a while, and I never saw it, but that was a while ago. A lot of cool people on the project.

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.)

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