Chicken (Scheme Implementation)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Chicken is a compiler and interpreter for the Scheme programming language that compiles Scheme code to standard C. It is mostly R5RS compliant and offers many extensions to the standard. Chicken is free software available under the BSD license. Like many Scheme compilers, Chicken uses standard C as an intermediate language. A Scheme program is translated into C by the Chicken compiler, and then a C compiler translates the C program into machine code for the target architecture, producing an executable program. The universal availability of C makes it ideal for this purpose. Chicken's design was inspired by a 1994 paper by Henry Baker that outlined an innovative strategy for Scheme compilation into C. A scheme program is compiled into C functions. These C functions never reach the return statement; instead, they call a new continuation when complete. These continuations are C functions themselves and are passed on as extra arguments to other C functions. They are calculated by the compiler.