Reaffirmed 2008. The form and meaning of programs written in the Scheme programming language, in particular, their syntax, the semantic rules for interpreting them, and the representation of data to be input or output by them, are specified. The fundamental ideas of the language and the notational conventions used for describing and writing programs in the language are presented. The syntax and semantics of expressions, programs, and definitions are specified. Scheme's built-in procedures, which include all of the language's data manipulation and input/output primitives, are described, and a formal syntax for Scheme written in extended Backus-Nauru form is p...

This standard specifies the representation of Scheme programs, their syntax, the semantic rules for interpreting them, and the representation of data to be input or output by them. This standard does not specify the mechanisms by which Scheme programs are transferred to and from system memory and placed into execution, or the size or complexity of a program and its data that will exceed the capacity of a particular implementation

Throughout its thirty-year life, the Lisp family of languages has continually evolved to encompass changing ideas about programming-language design. Scheme has participated in the evolution of Lisp. Scheme was one of the first programming languages to incorporate first-lass procedures as in the lambda calculus, thereby proving the usefulness of static scope rules and block structure in a dynamically typed language. Scheme was the first major dialect of Lisp to distinguish procedures from lambda expressions and symbols, to use a single lexical environment for all variables, and to evaluate the operator position of a procedure call in the same way as an operan...