@louis Nope, you cannot run a basic Lisp program in Scheme. There are plenty of standardized definitions of Lisp, we can start with .. Lisp 1.5.
@amszmidt @louis@emacs.ch Scheme is *a Lisp* in the sense that it is a dialect of the "Lisp family" of programming language.
Scheme is *not Lisp* in the sense that it is not a direct successor of Lisp 1.5, MacLisp, Interlisp, ..., Common Lisp.
Obviously, the meaning of the word Lisp in "it is a Lisp" and "it is Lisp" is different.
@amszmidt @louis@emacs.ch
> The only programming languages who have this dumb ass discussion is Lisp and Scheme.
Is Delphi a (dialect of) Pascal? Is VisualBasic a Basic? Is Self a Smalltalk? Yes and no.
Scheme is a "list processing" language, with macros. It is heavily inspired to Lisp, but it is also rather different. Hence, informally, it is called a language of the family of Lisp-like languages. Shortly, "a Lisp".
Scheme is not Lisp. I agree. But it is a language on the same family. So it is only a "war of terms". "a Lisp", "a dialect of Lisp", etc...
Someone got very mad in r/common_lisp once about SBCL 1.5 not being able to run m-expressions from the Lisp 1.5 manual. So be careful what one wishes for.
@llewelly @mzan @louis In biology you have DNA, which you can trace. There is no such thing when it comes to programming languages, Scheme was a complete break from Lisp. It is me going into the lab, making a new cat inspired animal, with horns, not having four paws, but four hands, and a horn, and then calling it a cat.
@amszmidt @mzan @louis
chimps, including bonobos, are more closely related to humans than either is to gorillas. But your example is an artifact of human exceptionalism; note Canidae is often called "the dog family" even though wolves, foxes, etc, are not exactly domestic dogs. See also: weasel family, crocodile family, and more.
@amszmidt @mzan @louis
I will grant my analogy (like all analogies) is flawed; as you imply, design plays a strong role in programming languages, and it is entirely absent from evolution.
However - cladistics, which is use to trace and build family trees of organisms based on their DNA, is also used to trace features of spoken and written languages, and surely someone has tried it for programming languages.
@amszmidt @mzan @louis
also, there thousands of organisms known from the fossil record that are so old there is little to no hope of recovering any molecular information. (Oldest DNA: so far only a few million years. Oldest proteins: so far only few million more) For those fossil life forms, cladistics uses morphological features, since DNA isn't available.
@mzan @louis for something to be a dialect, it had to be understood in its main language. Scheme cannot be understood by a Lisp programmer or interpreter. They are not dialects, they are not the same language, Is JavaScript a C? Is it a dialect if C? The only programming languages who have this dumb ass discussion is Lisp and Scheme.