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Perhaps. Though (PLT) Scheme seems (to me) the better basis for any work on Lisp nowadays. Common Lisp is just too ugly.

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I find Scheme quite a bit more ugly than Common Lisp. The simplistic design makes it much more unpleasant to use as CL. For learning programming its fine, smaller programming task are fine too, but anything interesting is just a pain. Scheme then provides much on top with SRFIs (and similar extensions) - unfortunately the base language does not scale.

I can't help love the power of real macros, though. Can you get something like loop to work in Scheme?

To me that's just part of the beauty of Common Lisp. While it is rather ugly in some places, it has these nuggets of just pure gold.

(I actually do not know scheme well enough to say. Are such complicated macros possible in it?)

See http://docs.plt-scheme.org/mzlib/mzlib_defmacro.html

(And I would not want to do loop in Scheme. That's just too imperative. Interestingly Haskell's special syntax for Monads and its lazyness makes the need for most macros / special forms go away (though not for all, and Haskell has plenty of syntax on the surface).)

Consider that Paul Graham, the author of the fine book "On Lisp", chose PLT Scheme to implement Arc on top.

IIRC, they didn't choose PLT (over other Schemes) for any particularly compelling reasons.

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