@xameer the “R7RS small” Scheme standard has a full numerical tower built-in, including unbounded integers.
(- (+ (expt 10 100) 1) (expt 10 100))gives you precisely the correct answer without any floating-point operations. Although macros for symbolic computation with optimization that would avoid computation of (expr 10 100) is “an exercise left to the reader.” Haskell might do the optimal computation though thanks to it’s lazy evaluation.
I've also done the same for my generalized-arrays egg! Use transducers everywhere!
“Question for lispers with experience: If you should start to learn a LISP style language today, which one do you pick up? Why?”
@syntaxerror The R7RS “Small” Scheme standard is roughly 80 pages, so you can learn about all of the language features very quickly. I love it because of it’s minimalism, it is my preferred language.
My take on it is that the “Small” Scheme standard is perfectly designed to construct larger programming languages with more features. One such language is R7RS “Large” Scheme, but you could theoretically use it to implement Common Lisp, Python, JavaScript, or any other language.
The R7RS “Large” standard is still being discussed (10 years after “small” was ratified), but it relies heavily on the “Scheme Request For Implementation“ (SRFI) process to fill out features. The larger portion of the R7RS “Large” standard is already ratified and published, so it is still useful even though it is not complete.
There are many Scheme implementations, but I recommend Guile, as it is almost completely R7RS-Small compliant, and has a ton of other useful features that come with it out of the box. So if you need, for example, a quick web server, or a way to search your filesystem, Guile has modules for that.
Another good batteries-included Lisp is Racket, which is a larger language built on top of Chez Scheme (an R6RS Standard Scheme implementation). You can easily install the R7RS Scheme language pack on Racket and write your code in Scheme as you read through the R7RS standard document.
Both Guile and Racket/CS (Chez Scheme) not only have many useful features, but compile to binary code that runs extremely fast for a high-level language.
Also, if you haven’t already, try to learn to use Emacs.
