It's interesting how proper tail recursion is such a subtle and deep feature that is easy to get wrong in a language. Many languages don't support it, such as Java, and so you don't miss it if you don't have it ( Read more... )

SICP Section 2.1 ( Read more... )

High order procedures are a very powerful mechanism for designing procedures. In languages that support it, one can pass procedures into procedures as arguments, or similarly have a procedure which returns a procedure as it’s result ( Read more... )

I have been slow in posting these, but here is exercises 1.1 - 1.7

1. Exercise 1.1
2. Exercise 1.2
3. Exercise 1.3
4. Exercise 1.4
5. Exercise 1.5

Reading section 1.2 and watching Lecture 1-b. Up until now, I had the false understanding that any procedure which calls itself was considered recursive in terms of both written procedure and runtime process. Aside, that doesn't mean that I shied away from using recursion, and I did have an intuitive feel that some forms of recursion performed ( Read more... )

I had a lot of fun last night. We had our kick off meeting in the University district at Big Time Brewery. We settled all the logistics of how to run the group. Most of the people are attached to UW directly or indirectly and our backgrounds vary. I think attrition will be high for SICP, but we are starting with a promising crew.

For anyone setting ( Read more... )

Howdy.

I am going to use this livejournal for recording my progress through SICP. I have wanted to work through this text for a long time, as "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" is a classic. I am doing two independent study classes with Regis university as part of a Masters degree through their professional studies program.
So ( Read more... )