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... )

How many occurrences of Car in PLT Scheme is a great blog post. I have an idea for learning new PL languages and their idioms. Get a sample of "good" projects, and then do static code analysis. This would allow you to study the documentation of syntax in the order it is used the most, and discover those idioms faster ( 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... )

Section 1.1 of SICP starts of with some simple, straight forward basics of programming languages, but at the same time provided some deep food for thought.

Judging for this limited exposure, Scheme has a very minimal syntax and is incredibly regular. We learn how to use expressions and names. Names are similar to variable names from a language like ( Read more... )

A controversial R6RS has been ratified. I like how open the voting is, so I can read what concerns were voiced. 65.7% voted in favor of the new standard. Yikes, that is a narrow margin. According to the document 60% were required to pass.

Of course as a complete newbie to Scheme, I have no opinion. I would tend to agree with the gist of the ideas ( 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... )

The Seattle SICP Study Group kick off meeting is this Thursday 8/23 at Big Time Brewery 7pm. I am looking forward to meeting everyone. There are about 20 members in the Google group, but I don't know how many will physically show up. It will be fun to meet every week and discuss the book.

Tonight I am going to the SeaFunc meeting at Ralph's Grocery ( 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... )