Limitations in the current implementation

This page describes the limitations on the current implementation of Stak Scheme. These limitations are considered transient although some of them do not have any concrete resolution plans right now; we hopefully remove these limitations in the future versions of Stak Scheme without incurring too much complexity.

Number representation

Number representation in Stak Scheme is either a 64-bit floating point number (IEEE 754) or a 63-bit integer.

The other “full” implementations of the R7RS-small standard, such as Chibi Scheme, Gauche, and Guile, often come with the full numeric tower.

String and character representation

Stak Scheme supports only ASCII characters but not multi-byte characters in Unicode in strings and characters.

Exception handling

Stak Scheme does not raise certain runtime errors as exceptions. For example, you cannot catch argument count mismatches on procedure calls and out-of-memory errors.