Programming language dialect

A dialect of a programming language is a (relatively small) variation or extension of the language that does not change its intrinsic nature. With languages such as Scheme programming language and Forth programming language, standards may be considered insufficient, inadequate or even illegitimate by implementors, so often they will deviate from the standard, making a new dialect. In other cases, a dialect is created for use in a domain-specific language, often a subset. In the Common Lisp world, most languages that use basic S-expression syntax and Lisp-like semantics are considered Lisp dialects, even though they vary wildly, as do, say, Bigloo Scheme and newLisp.