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From: matthias@titan.rice.edu (Matthias Felleisen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: What is a Scheme?
Message-ID: <1990Aug23.020704.19833@rice.edu>
Date: 23 Aug 90 02:07:04 GMT
References: <JINX.90Aug22122411@chamarti.ai.mit.edu> <9008221644.aa03978@mc.lcs.mit.edu>
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Guillermo J. Rozas writes that "since [Scheme] is such that even
numbers and strings (and pairs, etc.) can be built out of the very
powerful glue of procedures."  I disagree. Please show us how to build
numbers such that number? and procedure? work and our programs still
work, too.

I maintain that Schemeness includes untypedness, id, lambda, and
application, set!, call/cc and (whatever) datatypes (one likes) with
predicates. Indeed, I go even as far as saying that the two major
contributions of Scheme as a language are UNTYPED CLOSURES and
FIRST-CLASS CONTINUATIONS. All things in Scheme were around before but
without Scheme these two wouldn't have made it into today's
programming language world.

-- Matthias