The scheme of things: streams versus generators

Abstract

With this article I'm changing the series title to "The Scheme of Things". The original title was a weak pun on the technical term environment. An environment, you see, associates names with their meanings. In the Scheme environment, for example, the word "environment" has the meaning just stated, while in some other parts of the programming language world the word "environment" has a less technical meaning that refers to the stuff that comes with a programming system. One of my purposes has been to explain the meaning of terms in the Scheme environment. Sometimes a word like "environment" or "stream" means something different in Scheme than it does in some other dialect of Lisp, usually because the Scheme terminology follows that of another well-established language or group of languages.