Languages

Scheme

Functional Language

Citation Formats

General Reference

Computing Atlas. "Scheme." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/scheme.

APA Style

Computing Atlas. (n.d.). Scheme. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/scheme

BibTeX

@misc{computingatlas-scheme,
  author = {Computing Atlas},
  title = {Scheme},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-computing.interactiveatlas.org/languages/scheme},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Scheme is a dialect of Lisp created by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman in 1975 at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was the first Lisp dialect to choose lexical scope, an approach Sussman brought from his study of ALGOL, and the first to require implementations to perform tail-call optimization.

Facts

First Released

1975 1

Paradigm

Multi-paradigm: functional, imperative, meta-programming; a Lisp dialect with lexically scoped variables. 1

Significance

As the first Lisp dialect to require proper tail calls and to adopt lexical scoping, Scheme strengthened functional-programming style and recursive algorithms, and influenced the later development of Common Lisp. 1

Cross-Tradition Connections

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Scheme (programming language)

Wikimedia FoundationHistory section

Quote, History section

Scheme was created during the 1970s at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) and released by its developers, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman

View the Source

1. Wikipedia: Scheme (programming language)

Wikimedia FoundationInfoboxView the Source

1. Wikipedia: Scheme (programming language)

Wikimedia FoundationLead / History section

Quote, Lead / History section