file extension SMD

File extension SMD description:

According to Steele and Gabriel's "The Evolution of Lisp" paper, Scheme was originally called Schemer, in the tradition of the AI languages Planner and Conniver. But the ITS operating system had a 6-character limitation of file names, so the names were shortened to PLNR, CNVR, and SCHEME. Eventually the truncated name Scheme stuck.

Scheme is a dialect of Lisp that stresses conceptual elegance and simplicity. It is much smaller than Common Lisp; the language specification is about 50 pages, compared to Common Lisp's 1300 page draft standard. Advocates of Scheme often find it amusing that the entire Scheme standard is shorter than the index to Guy Steele's "Common Lisp: the Language, 2nd Edition". Unlike the Scheme standard, the Common Lisp standard has a large library of utility functions, a standard object-oriented programming facility (CLOS), and a sophisticated condition handling system.

Scheme is often used in computer science curricula and programming language research, due to its ability to represent many programming abstractions with its simple primitives. It is also an ideal test bed for compilation and interpretation techniques since it is possible to write a simple, yet fully standards-compliant Scheme interpreter in just a few days.