R6RS vs. R5RS scheme

Question

I'm relatively new to scheme and am having a hard time finding a concrete document online overviewing the major changes that happened with R6RS. Anyone care to elaborate?

Encourage

R5RS and R6RS are worlds apart, and it's probably worth treating them as totally separate languages. – Aeciospore

Answer 1

http://community.schemewiki.org/?R6RS has compiled a list of high level changes with some commentary, including:

• case sensitive syntax
• square brackets are now equivalent to parentheses (e.g., (let ([foo 3]) ...) - this was supported in some scheme implementations but is now part of the standard
• retaining the ability to return multiple values
• more escape characters in strings, e.g., "\n"
• hashtables as a library
• multiline and expression comments

http://www.r6rs.org/versions/CHANGES

http://www.r6rs.org/formal-comments/

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1342

If you're relatively new to scheme and have the fortitude you will get more mileage reading the spec instead of skimming a changelog though...

Panicle

I know this list just quotes the site, but I don't think evaluation order has ever been a subject of any Scheme report and has always been unspecified. – Vested