The Scam Programming Language

written by: John C. Lusth

Revision Date: November 9, 2011

Printable Version

Scam

Scam is a nifty little language that looks a lot like Scheme, but is so much more. Scam is:

• an impure functional language with Scheme-like syntax
• a language where writing iterators like while and for is possible purely through function definition
• a language where everything is a function, including define and set! - overloading these functions can be fun!
• a fully object-oriented language with trivial syntax and easy-to-comprehend semantics
• a language with programmer-controlled delayed evaluation
• a language with built-in garbage collection
• a language that optimizes tail-recurion

Scam's homepage is beastie.cs.ua.edu/scam.

Scam versus Scheme

For Scheme programmers, here is a list of important differences: quick hits.

Downloads

Latest Scam versions:

scam-i386.tgz

scam-amd64.tgz

scam-OSX.tgz

 

scam-1.0_i386.deb

scam-1.0_amd64.deb

Installation Notes

To install Scam from a deb package (using scam_1.0_i386.deb as an example), run the command:

    sudo dpkg -i scam_1.0_i386.deb

If you are on a system without sudo, run the above command as root without the sudo prefix.

To install Scam from a tarball, perform the following steps (using scam-i386.tgz as an example)...

1. Save the download to a file, noting where it was saved. For the rest of the steps, assume the tar file was saved in a Downloads directory that hangs of the your home directory.
2. Make a directory named scam that hangs off your home directory and then move into that directory

       mkdir ~/scam
       cd ~/scam
   

3. Untar the download in the scam directory:

       tar xvzf ~/Downloads/scam-i386.tgz
   

4. copy the scam executable to a directory in your path:

       cp scam ~/bin                # if you have your own bin
   

   or

       sudo cp scam /usr/local/bin  #if you have sudo privleges
   

   or you can put ~/scam in your path.

If you have trouble installing Scam, send a message to lusth@cs.ua.edu.

Learning more about Scam

There is an Open Source reference manual that delves into Scam in detail. It is called The Scam Reference Manual

The reference manual gives the nuts and bolts on the syntax and semantics of Scam.

About this website

This website is rendered in the Old School style. Old School is known for its somewhat spartan, but clean and crisp, no-nonsense, get-down-to-brass-tacks appearance. Old School was invented by Tim Berners-Lee during the latter part of the last century. It is made a bit more flashy using a style sheet.

Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation, grant numbers #00244269 and #0633290.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.