What can Scheme do as a programming language?
Anything that any other “general-purpose” language can do! That is what we meant when we said that Scheme was “universal” at the beginning of the course; any computable function can be computed in Scheme. (By the way, Ada and Java and most languages that you know are universal in this sense.) You could use Scheme to write business data processing software, network control software, artificial intelligence programs, etc. People have used Scheme for all of these purposes. For example: • As mentioned last week, the software that became Yahoo! Store was written in Common Lisp, Scheme’s full-featured cousin. Check out Paul Graham’s telling of the story. • A former student who now works for Short’s Travel sent me a link to an article on the implementation of Orbitz, one of the major on-line airline reservation database systems, in Common Lisp. • From the domain of operating systems, see this paper describing how to implement secure kernels using Scheme and the lambda calculus. • Take a look
