I want to develop a functional language in the style of Scheme that improves on Scheme by unifying the concepts of Scheme and removing inconsistencies in the implementation. The language should include a concept of lazy evaluation allowing the writing of functions like cond, and, or as they now work in scheme but allowing them to be passed and applied. Also it will attempt to unify the various data types in Scheme and provide a more consistent way of extending the type system. Finally I would like to reconsider the type hierarchy, do chars, numbers, lists and vector all truly represent subtypes of SExpression?

• Simple web site containing:
• A Complete Specification of Better Scheme
• A Discussion of reasons/decisions made in the language design
• A Discussion of any known problems or concerns with the language design
• Journal of thoughts and ideas
• Reference sections, i.e. books and links.
• Implementation of an interpreter for Better Scheme in Java
  • At least core of language
  • Support for evaluating expressions, first class functions, and lazy evaluation
  • May not support tail recursion optimizations, advanced number handling (complex etc.), advanced data structures (vectors, structs)
  • Will not support files, networks, time etc.
  • Uses good object design to interpret language by converting into object structures. Lexer and parser may not use good OO

The reasons I want to work on Better Scheme include: To gain a better understanding of the workings and concepts behind functional programming languages. To understand regular Scheme better. To demonstrate myself to be someone who does research in programming languages and produces languages with a high degree of logical consistency.

jwalker@cs.oberlin.edu