Scheme is a programming language that supports multiple paradigms, including functional and imperative programming. It is one of the three main dialects of Lisp, alongside Common Lisp and Clojure. Unlike Common Lisp, Scheme follows a minimalist design philosophy, specifying a small standard core with powerful tools for language extension.
In a computer language, a reserved word is a word that cannot be used as an identifier, such as the name of a variable, function, or label – it is "reserved from use". This is a syntactic definition, and a reserved word may have no meaning.
In computing, s-expressions, sexprs or sexps are a notation for nested list (tree-structured) data, invented for and popularized by the programming language Lisp, which uses them for source code as well as data. In the usual parenthesized syntax of Lisp, an s-expression is classically defined as
- an atom, or
- an expression of the form
(x. y) where x and y are s-expressions.
In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes, i.e. performs instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:
- parse the source code and perform its behavior directly;
- translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this;
- explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system.
In computer science, a preprocessor is a program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input to another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which is often used by some subsequent programs like compilers. The amount and kind of processing done depends on the nature of the preprocessor; some preprocessors are only capable of performing relatively simple textual substitutions and macro expansions, while others have the power of full-fledged programming languages.
The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the facility for object-oriented programming which is part of ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such as C++ or Java. CLOS was inspired by earlier Lisp object systems such as MIT Flavors and CommonLoops, although it is more general than either. Originally proposed as an add-on, CLOS was adopted as part of the ANSI standard for Common Lisp and has been adapted into other Lisp dialects such as EuLisp or Emacs Lisp.
In computer programming, cons is a fundamental function in most dialects of the Lisp programming language. consconstructs memory objects which hold two values or pointers to values. These objects are referred to as (cons) cells, conses, non-atomic s-expressions ("NATSes"), or (cons) pairs. In Lisp jargon, the expression "to cons x onto y" means to construct a new object with (cons xy). The resulting pair has a left half, referred to as the car, and a right half, referred to as the cdr.
Hygienic macros are macros whose expansion is guaranteed not to cause the accidental capture of identifiers. They are a feature of programming languages such as Scheme, Dylan and Rust. The general problem of accidental capture was well known within the Lisp community prior to the introduction of hygienic macros. Macro writers would use language features that would generate unique identifiers or use obfuscated identifiers in order to avoid the problem. Hygienic macros are a programmatic solution to the capture problem that is integrated into the macro expander itself. The term "hygiene" was coined in Kohlbecker et al.'s 1986 paper that introduced hygienic macro expansion, inspired by the terminology used in mathematics.
Metaprogramming is a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat other programs as their data. It means that a program can be designed to read, generate, analyze or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running. In some cases, this allows programmers to minimize the number of lines of code to express a solution, in turn reducing development time. It also allows programs greater flexibility to efficiently handle new situations without recompilation.
In some programming languages, eval is a function which evaluates a string as though it were an expression and returns a result; in others, it executes multiple lines of code as though they had been included instead of the line including the eval. The input to eval is not necessarily a string; it may be structured representation of code, such as an abstract syntax tree, or of special type such as code. The analog for a statement is exec, which executes a string as if it were a statement; in some languages, such as Python, both are present, while in other languages only one of either eval or exec is.
Programming languages typically support a set of operators: constructs which behave generally like functions, but which differ syntactically or semantically from usual functions. Common simple examples include arithmetic, comparison, and logical operations. More involved examples include assignment, field access in a record or object, and the scope resolution operator. Languages usually define a set of built-in operators, and in some cases allow user-defined operators.
In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or operator that tests or defines some kind of relation between two entities. These include numerical equality and inequalities.
A read–eval–print loop (REPL), also termed an interactive toplevel or language shell, is a simple, interactive computer programming environment that takes single user inputs, evaluates them, and returns the result to the user; a program written in a REPL environment is executed piecewise. The term is usually used to refer to programming interfaces similar to the classic Lisp machine interactive environment. Common examples include command line shells and similar environments for programming languages, and is very characteristic of scripting languages.
XL stands for eXtensible Language. It is the first and so far the only computer programming language designed to support concept programming.
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the set of rules that defines the combinations of symbols that are considered to be a correctly structured document or fragment in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and markup languages, where the document represents data. The syntax of a language defines its surface form. Text-based computer languages are based on sequences of characters, while visual programming languages are based on the spatial layout and connections between symbols. Documents that are syntactically invalid are said to have a syntax error.
In computer programming, homoiconicity is a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program's internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself. For example, a Lisp program is written as a regular Lisp list, and can be manipulated by other Lisp code. In homoiconic languages, all code can be accessed and transformed as data, using the same representation. This property is often summarized by saying that the language treats "code as data".
PicoLisp is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp. It runs on operating systems including Linux and others that are Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant. Its most prominent features are simplicity and minimalism. It is built on one internal data type: a cell. On the language level, a programmer can use three different data types being represented by cells and differentiated by bits at the end of the cell. It is free and open-source software released under an MIT License (X11).
