I shouldn't contradict you, since I'm co-author of an introductory CS text using Scheme, but actually the read-eval-print loop isn't a distinguishing advantage vis-a-vis Java, because there is a cool Java environment called BlueJ that essentially provides the same kind of interface, where you don't have to write I/O code to interact with objects' methods. See http://www.bluej.org/. (Of course, there are other reasons why Scheme may still be a good choice.)
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I shouldn't contradict you, since I'm co-author of an introductory CS text using Scheme, but actually the read-eval-print loop isn't a distinguishing advantage vis-a-vis Java, because there is a cool Java environment called BlueJ that essentially provides the same kind of interface, where you don't have to write I/O code to interact with objects' methods. See http://www.bluej.org/. (Of course, there are other reasons why Scheme may still be a good choice.)