intro.tex

\extrapart{Introduction}

\label{historysection}

Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top
of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make
additional features appear necessary.  Pico Scheme continues this
tradition by creating a smaller subset of \rsevenrs{} that can be easily
implemented and understood, yet remains a full programming
language. Features including side effects and continuations that add
complication to both the denotational semantics and the implementation
are removed. In this report \rsevenrs{} is used to refer to the ``small''
language.



\medskip

We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme community, and so
we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part without fee.  In
particular, we encourage implementers of Pico Scheme to use this report as
a starting point for manuals and other documentation, modifying it as
necessary.



\subsection*{Acknowledgments}

Pico Scheme is based off of \rsevenrs{}\cite{R7RS} and we'd like to thank everyone from
that report, including the following people: David Adler, Eli
Barzilay, Taylan Ulrich Bay\i{}rl\i/Kammer, Marco Benelli, Pierpaolo
Bernardi, Peter Bex, Per Bothner, John Boyle, Taylor Campbell, Raffael
Cavallaro, William Clinger, Ray Dillinger, Biep Durieux, Sztefan
Edwards, Helmut Eller, Justin Ethier, Marc Feeley, Jay Reynolds
Freeman, Tony Garnock-Jones, Alan Manuel Gloria, Steve Hafner, Chris
Hanson, Sven Hartrumpf, Brian Harvey, Moritz Heidkamp, Jean-Michel
Hufflen, Aubrey Jaffer, Takashi Kato, Shiro Kawai, Richard Kelsey,
Oleg Kiselyov, Pjotr Kourzanov, Jonathan Kraut, Daniel Krueger,
Christian Stigen Larsen, Noah Lavine, Stephen Leach, Larry D. Lee, Kun
Liang, Thomas Lord, Vincent Stewart Manis, Perry Metzger, Michael
Montague, Mikael More, Vitaly Magerya, Vincent Manis, Vassil Nikolov,
Joseph Wayne Norton, Yuki Okumura, Daichi Oohashi, Jeronimo
Pellegrini, Jussi Piitulainen, Alex Queiroz, Jim Rees, Jonathan Rees,
Grant Rettke, Andrew Robbins, Devon Schudy, Bakul Shah, Olin Shivers,
Robert Smith, Arthur Smyles, Michael Sperber, John David Stone, Jay
Sulzberger, Malcolm Tredinnick, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Andre van Tonder,
Daniel Villeneuve, Denis Washington, Alan Watson, Mark H.  Weaver,
G\"oran Weinholt, David A. Wheeler, Andy Wingo, James Wise, J\"org
F. Wittenberger, Kevin A. Wortman, Sascha Ziemann.

We would like to thank all the past editors prior to \rsevenrs, and the
people who helped them in turn: Hal Abelson, Norman Adams, David
Bartley, Alan Bawden, Michael Blair, Gary Brooks, George Carrette,
Andy Cromarty, Pavel Curtis, Jeff Dalton, Olivier Danvy, Betty Dexter,
Ken Dickey,
Bruce Duba, Robert Findler, Andy Freeman, Richard Gabriel, Yekta
G\"ursel, Ken Haase, Robert Halstead, Robert Hieb, Paul Hudak, Morry
Katz, Eugene Kohlbecker, Chris Lindblad, Jacob Matthews, Mark Meyer,
Jim Miller, Don Oxley, Jim Philbin, Kent Pitman, John Ramsdell,
Guillermo Rozas, Mike Shaff, Jonathan Shapiro, Guy Steele, Julie
Sussman, Perry Wagle, Mitchel Wand, Daniel Weise, Henry Wu, and Ozan
Yigit.  We thank Carol Fessenden, Daniel Friedman, and Christopher
Haynes for permission to use text from the Scheme 311 version 4
reference manual.  We thank Texas Instruments, Inc.~for permission to
use text from the {\em TI Scheme Language Reference
Manual}~\cite{TImanual85}.  We gladly acknowledge the influence of
manuals for MIT Scheme~\cite{MITScheme}, T~\cite{Rees84}, Scheme
84~\cite{Scheme84}, Common Lisp~\cite{CLtL}, and Algol 60~\cite{Naur63},
as well as \url{http://srfi.schemers.org}.



The subset of Scheme in
{\em The Little Schemer}~\cite{LittleSchemer} provided inspiration for Pico Scheme. We would like to thank Masanori Ogino, Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe, José Bollo, John Cowan, and Elizabeth Cogliati
for help with the Pico Scheme Report.