Robert Fisher
Just thinking out loud
The actors model and origin of Scheme
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Every description of Scheme seems to mention the part the actors model played in its origin.
The dialect of Lisp known as Scheme was originally an attempt by Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Steele during Autumn 1975 to explicate for themselves some aspects of Carl Hewitt’s theory of actors as a model of computation.
...from Guy L. Steele, Jr. and Richard P. Gabriel, “The Evolution of Lisp,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 28, no. 3 March 1993, pp. 231-270.
A newcoming to Scheme, however, may have a hard time understanding how the actors model could have lead to Scheme. “The Evolution of Lisp,” provides the answer.
Originally, Scheme had both lambda that implemented closures & alpha that implemented actors.
But the
lambdaandalphamechanisms were themselves identical and from this Sussman and Steele concluded that actors and closures were the same concept.
I don't understand why people think it's important to mention the actors model when describing Scheme but not to add a second sentence to clarify.
last updated 1 year ago #
