The challenge for me here (as someone whose only lisp experience is a smattering of the widely decried emacs-lisp), is figuring out which bits of arc are just lisp, and which bits are genuinely new.

So far as I can tell, at the moment, arc is just PLT scheme without so many libraries, with shorter names for several things, some syntactic sugar (the function composition operator for example) and some new looping constructs.

There's almost certainly more to it than that, but I'm having trouble finding it without learning PLT first. Given those first impressions, I'm thinking that maybe my time would actually be better spent learning PLT first...

Oh yes - and with strings as lists - I certainly approve of that.

I dunno - does anyone with more knowledge have an opinion on which is worth spending time on first?