Peter, Wow, what an awesome answer. This is exactly right to the best of my own knowledge. I will add a few more facts.
As Peter knows, there are a few people out there who are 100% /au courant/ with both Common Lisp and Scheme, technically, culturally, and historically, and can accurately assess the similarities and differences in great detail and very fairly. Alan Bawden and Guy Steele are the ones who spring to mind, but I'm sure there are some others out there. Although Scheme has specs (for the different revisions) that are written far more carefully than the Common Lisp spec, nevertheless the differences between the implementations are severely worse than among the 11 Common Lisp implementations. (Alexey Radul did a presentation not long ago on this at the Boston Lisp Meeting.) Also, revision 6 (known as R6RS) of Scheme, which came out last year, is somewhat controversial, and some Scheme maintainers have said that they will stick at revision 5; but it remains to be seen. The guys behind PLT Scheme are extremely smart and are doing a wonderful job. They have some great programming tools, aimed at students, but usable by anyone. Someday it would be nice if someone created analogous technology for Common Lisp. -- Dan
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