R6RS vs. R5RS scheme

14
votes

I'm relatively new to scheme and am having a hard time finding a concrete document online overviewing the major changes that happened with R6RS. Anyone care to elaborate?

1
schemer6rsr5rs
R5RS and R6RS are worlds apart, and it's probably worth treating them as totally separate languages. - Chris Jester-Young

1 Answers

13
votes

http://community.schemewiki.org/?R6RS has compiled a list of high level changes with some commentary, including:

  • case sensitive syntax
  • square brackets are now equivalent to parentheses (e.g., (let ([foo 3]) ...) - this was supported in some scheme implementations but is now part of the standard
  • retaining the ability to return multiple values
  • more escape characters in strings, e.g., "\n"
  • hashtables as a library
  • multiline and expression comments

http://www.r6rs.org/versions/CHANGES

http://www.r6rs.org/formal-comments/

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1342

If you're relatively new to scheme and have the fortitude you will get more mileage reading the spec instead of skimming a changelog though...