On Oct 4, 2011, at 9:28 PM, Harry Spier wrote:

> Dear list members,
> 
> 
> I'm teaching myself Scheme (as an old imperative language programmer) by 
> going through SCIP, the little Schemer, the Seasoned Schemer etc.


As Dan used to say as we rewrote the book, "the books are not about Scheme". 
That's why you find CL compatibility notes. It's about 'recursive thinking' and 
that can happen in many languages. Neither Scheme nor Racket nor CL live up to 
the exact laws of the book, so if you interpret them strictly, you may 
encounter discrepancies. 

If you'd like these books generalized to 'design thinking' and in standard text 
form, I recommend HtDP (htdp.org) and HtDP/2e ( 
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Presentations/11GS/gs.pdf ). Again, they 
use neither Scheme nor Racket per se but teaching languages suitable for the 
design stages considered in the respective parts of the book. When you are thru 
with the book, you will know enough to adapt to full Racket quickly. 


> and #lang Racket by going through the Racket guide and documentation.  What I 
> would find useful is a list of the major differences between a standard form 
> of Scheme (such as r5rs for example) and #lang Racket.  Can any of the 
> members point me to such a list or table?


If I had your goal, I would not worry about any language standards. Nobody 
programs in language standards (Scheme, SML, Ecmascript aka Javascript, or you 
name any standard). 

In a nutshell, Racket is our reaction to the experience of building a large 
multi-lingual system in Scheme over 12 years. When we launched the TeachScheme! 
effort -- now known as Program by Design -- we wanted to prove to the world 
that building large systems in Scheme was feasible. The first idea that went 
out the door was R^nRS. It isn't feasible to create large systems in these 
languages in a sane manner when you have 20-30 people involved. R6RS -- heavily 
influenced by our experience -- comes closest but in the end we realized that 
our language had grown apart from the Scheme report effort. 

I have summarized what Racket is from my personal perspective and Asumu has 
provided the link. It's longer and a bit more concrete. 

Hope this helps -- Matthias

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