Which environment, IDE or interpreter to put in practice Scheme?

Question

I\'ve been making my way through The Little Schemer and I was wondering what environment, IDE or interpreter would be best to use in order to test any of the Scheme cod

Answer 1

I am currently working through the Little Schemer as well and use Emacs as my environment, along Quack, which adds additional support and utilities for scheme-mode within Emacs.

If you are planning on experimenting with other Lisps (e.g. Common Lisp), Emacs has excellent support for those dialects as well (Emacs itself can be customized with its own dialect of Lisp, appropriately named Emacs Lisp).

As far as Scheme implementations go, I am currently using Petit Chez Scheme, which is an interpreted, freely distributable version of Chez Scheme (which uses a compiler and costs money to obtain a license).

Answer 2

I would highly recommend both Chicken and Gauche for scheme.

Answer 3

It doesn't matter, as long as you subscribe to the mailing list(wiki/irc/online-community-site) for the associated community. It's probably worth taking a look at the list description and archives to be sure you are in the right one.

Most of these are friendly and welcoming to newcomers, so don't be afraid to ask.

It's also worth searching the archives of their mailing list(or FAQ or whatever they use) when you have a question - just in case it is a frequent question.

Good Luck!

Answer 4

Racket (formerly Dr Scheme) has a nice editor, several different Scheme dialects, an attempt at visual debugging, lots of libraries, and can run on most platforms. It even has some modes specifically geared around learning the language.

Answer 5

If you just want to test your scheme code, I would recommend PLT Scheme. It offers a very complete environment, with debugger, help, etc., and works on most platforms.

But if you also want to get an idea of how the interpreter behind the scenes works, and have Visual Studio, I would recommend Tachy. It is a very lightweight scheme interpreter written in c#. It allows you to debug just your scheme code, or also step through the c# interpreter behind the scenes to see what is going on.