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  5. Chicken Scheme vs Common Lisp

Chicken Scheme vs Common Lisp

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Stacks268
Followers255
Votes145
Chicken Scheme
Chicken Scheme
Stacks8
Followers15
Votes0
GitHub Stars141
Forks5

Chicken Scheme vs Common Lisp: What are the differences?

Introduction

Chicken Scheme and Common Lisp are two different programming languages that are used for different purposes. While Chicken Scheme is a practical and portable Scheme implementation, Common Lisp is a general-purpose programming language known for its powerful features. In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Chicken Scheme and Common Lisp.

  1. Syntax: Chicken Scheme follows the traditional Lisp syntax with its use of parentheses and prefix notation. On the other hand, Common Lisp has a more flexible syntax that allows for different styles of programming, including infix notation and prefix notation.

  2. Object-Oriented Programming: Chicken Scheme supports object-oriented programming through an extension called Chicken Object System (CLOS), which is inspired by the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). Common Lisp, on the other hand, has native support for object-oriented programming with its powerful CLOS.

  3. Community and Libraries: Common Lisp has a larger and more active community compared to Chicken Scheme. This means that there are more libraries and resources available for Common Lisp, making it easier to find solutions to common programming problems. Chicken Scheme, although it has a smaller community, still has a respectable number of libraries and resources.

  4. Portability: Chicken Scheme is designed to be highly portable, allowing it to run on various platforms without modification. Common Lisp, on the other hand, may require some modifications to run on different platforms due to different implementations.

  5. Interoperability: Common Lisp provides excellent support for interoperability with other programming languages through its Foreign Function Interface (FFI). This allows Common Lisp programs to call and be called by code written in other languages. While Chicken Scheme also supports interoperability through its C Interface, it may require more manual work compared to Common Lisp.

  6. Development Environment: Common Lisp has more mature and feature-rich development environments compared to Chicken Scheme. Some popular Common Lisp development environments include Emacs with SLIME, Allegro CL, and LispWorks. Chicken Scheme, although it has its own development environment called "Chickadee," may not have as many features and integrations as Common Lisp's development environments.

In summary, Chicken Scheme and Common Lisp differ in their syntax, support for object-oriented programming, community and libraries, portability, interoperability, and development environments. While Chicken Scheme is portable and practical, Common Lisp provides more powerful features, a larger community, and a more mature development environment.

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Detailed Comparison

Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Chicken Scheme
Chicken Scheme

Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became the favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order functions, recursion, and the self-hosting compiler. [source: wikipedia]

Fast implementation of Scheme programming languge, which compiles directly to C

-
Fast; Lisp; Minimal
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
141
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
5
Stacks
268
Stacks
8
Followers
255
Followers
15
Votes
145
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 24
    Flexibility
  • 22
    High-performance
  • 17
    Comfortable: garbage collection, closures, macros, REPL
  • 13
    Stable
  • 12
    Lisp
Cons
  • 4
    Too many Parentheses
  • 3
    Standard did not evolve since 1994
  • 2
    Small library ecosystem
  • 2
    No hygienic macros
  • 1
    Ultra-conservative community
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
C#
C#
C++
C++
Linux
Linux
Windows
Windows
Mac OS X
Mac OS X

What are some alternatives to Common Lisp, Chicken Scheme?

JavaScript

JavaScript

JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

Python

Python

Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.

PHP

PHP

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

Ruby

Ruby

Ruby is a language of careful balance. Its creator, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, blended parts of his favorite languages (Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp) to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.

Java

Java

Java is a programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. There are lots of applications and websites that will not work unless you have Java installed, and more are created every day. Java is fast, secure, and reliable. From laptops to datacenters, game consoles to scientific supercomputers, cell phones to the Internet, Java is everywhere!

Golang

Golang

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

HTML5

HTML5

HTML5 is a core technology markup language of the Internet used for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web. As of October 2014 this is the final and complete fifth revision of the HTML standard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The previous version, HTML 4, was standardised in 1997.

C#

C#

C# (pronounced "See Sharp") is a simple, modern, object-oriented, and type-safe programming language. C# has its roots in the C family of languages and will be immediately familiar to C, C++, Java, and JavaScript programmers.

Scala

Scala

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.

Elixir

Elixir

Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

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