The report gives a defining description of the programming language Scheme. Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language1 invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and object-oriented styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.
The introduction offers a brief history of the language and of the report.
The first three chapters present the fundamental ideas of the language and describe the notational conventions used for describing the language and for writing programs in the language.
Chapters 4 (Expressions) and 5 (Program structure) describe the syntax and semantics of expressions, definitions, programs, and libraries.
Chapter 6 (Standard procedures) describes Scheme’s built-in procedures, which include all of the language’s data manipulation and input/output primitives.
Chapter 7 (Formal syntax and semantics) provides a formal syntax for Scheme written in extended BNF (Backus-Naur form), along with a formal denotational semantics. An example of the use of the language follows the formal syntax and semantics.
Appendix A (Standard Libraries) provides a list of the standard libraries and the identifiers that they export.
Appendix B (Standard Feature Identifiers) provides a list of optional but standardized implementation feature names.
The report concludes with a list of references and an alphabetic index.
Note: The editors of the R5RS (Revised⁵ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme) and R6RS (Revised⁶ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme) reports are listed as authors of this report in recognition of the substantial portions of this report that are copied directly from R5RS and R6RS. There is no intended implication that those editors, individually or collectively, support or do not support this report.
John McCarthy. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) 3(4):184–195, April 1960.