the book website/author claims racket to be "the most unique programming language in the world"?
Is it really, I know that racket is a scheme implementation, I thought scheme is to lisp what java is to c++, a saner less powerful version
Is it really, I know that racket is a scheme implementation, I thought scheme is to lisp what java is to c++, a saner less powerful version
While it's tempting to think of Racket as a Scheme implementation, and that was at one time true, the situation these days is quite different. It's a lot more accurate to say that Racket ships with a Scheme-like default language (and an actual R5RS-compatible Scheme), but that it's actually a wonderful language toolkit. Racket has the ability for individual modules to use their own syntax. Not macros; full-fledged syntax. Racket ships with several Lisp-like syntaxes, but it also ships with Datalog and ALGOL-68. And this is very much unique to Racket.
Racket is not a Scheme implementation, which is one of the reasons it is now called "Racket" (Scheme used to be part of its name.)
It is a Lisp dialect that is "a descendant of Scheme". The Racket distribution includes support for a variety of different languages (including implementations of R5RS and R6RS Scheme), but the Racket language is not a Scheme implementation.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Interesting_Man_in_the...
So there can be many unique things.
Also, it could be argued that the last element is the "most unique" in that it has less similarities with the other members.