You can find a lot of disagreement in the google groups thread linked. Erik Naggum, Ron Garret (posting as Erann Gat), and Kent Pitman show up. Naggum as usual penetrates the usual back-and-forth with a stimulating meta-argument.
I've pasted some text from that thread. I pasted reasons not because of their quality, but to show that there were people passionate about the distinction.
> at the Lisp & Functional Programming conference, there was
serious difficulty getting Lisp papers accepted. Lisp papers were
about engineering, and Scheme papers were about mathy and theoretical
issues. And, to be utterly crude about it, what I think gets papers
accepted to such conferences is heavy use of greek letters
> a scheme program is defined as
a string of characters whereas a CL program is defined as a sequence
of lists of Lisp objects. This may seem pedantic or trivial but a lot
of different design decisions follow from this. It makes Scheme an
infix member of the Algol language family.
> The Scheme community has evolved a set of values at
odds with the spirit of Lisp: the goal for simplicity at the expense
of convenience (compare the concept of CL's $item designators with the
design of convert stuff explicitly like Scheme's exact->inexact), the
goal of only giving basic blocks and letting you assemble stuff
yourself (call/cc isn't a replacement for a worked out exception
system).
> I think it's a small group of insecure Scheme users who think that
they should be considered "A Lisp" so that they get all the
"publicity" that Lisp does along with the publicity that Scheme does.
> What those Schemers get from defaming Lisp beats me. Probaby some sort
of jealous envy.
> a scheme program is defined as a string of characters whereas a CL program is defined as a sequence of lists of Lisp objects. This may seem pedantic or trivial but a lot of different design decisions follow from this. It makes Scheme an infix member of the Algol language family.
Does anybody have any idea what he is referring to? I can perhaps see the first part being true, even though most of rnrs speaks in terms of objects.
But how in the heck could Scheme possibly be considered infix, or "an" ALGOL?
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.lisp/Bj8Hx...
I've pasted some text from that thread. I pasted reasons not because of their quality, but to show that there were people passionate about the distinction.
> at the Lisp & Functional Programming conference, there was serious difficulty getting Lisp papers accepted. Lisp papers were about engineering, and Scheme papers were about mathy and theoretical issues. And, to be utterly crude about it, what I think gets papers accepted to such conferences is heavy use of greek letters
> a scheme program is defined as a string of characters whereas a CL program is defined as a sequence of lists of Lisp objects. This may seem pedantic or trivial but a lot of different design decisions follow from this. It makes Scheme an infix member of the Algol language family.
> The Scheme community has evolved a set of values at odds with the spirit of Lisp: the goal for simplicity at the expense of convenience (compare the concept of CL's $item designators with the design of convert stuff explicitly like Scheme's exact->inexact), the goal of only giving basic blocks and letting you assemble stuff yourself (call/cc isn't a replacement for a worked out exception system).
> I think it's a small group of insecure Scheme users who think that they should be considered "A Lisp" so that they get all the "publicity" that Lisp does along with the publicity that Scheme does.
> What those Schemers get from defaming Lisp beats me. Probaby some sort of jealous envy.