Editing Scheme (programming language) (section)

===Order of evaluation of procedure arguments===
Most Lisps specify an order of evaluation for procedure arguments. Scheme does not. Order of evaluation—including the order in which the expression in the operator position is evaluated—may be chosen by an implementation on a call-by-call basis, and the only constraint is that "the effect of any concurrent evaluation of the operator and operand expressions is constrained to be consistent with some sequential order of evaluation." (R5RS sec. 4.1.3)<ref name="r5rs"/>
<syntaxhighlight lang="Scheme">
(let ((ev (lambda(n) (display "Evaluating ")
                     (display (if (procedure? n) "procedure" n))
                     (newline) n)))
  ((ev +) (ev 1) (ev 2)))
===> 3
</syntaxhighlight>
<syntaxhighlight lang="output">
Evaluating 1
Evaluating 2
Evaluating procedure
</syntaxhighlight>
ev is a procedure that describes the argument passed to it, then returns the value of the argument. In contrast with other Lisps, the appearance of an expression in the operator position (the first item) of a Scheme expression is quite legal, as long as the result of the expression in the operator position is a procedure.

In calling the procedure "{{mono|+}}" to add 1 and 2, the expressions {{mono|(ev +), (ev 1)}} and {{mono|(ev 2)}} may be evaluated in any order, as long as the effect is not as if they were evaluated in parallel. Thus the following three lines may be displayed in any order by standard Scheme when the above example code is executed, although the text of one line may not be interleaved with another because that would violate the sequential evaluation constraint.