Introducing the “SICP reading notes”
June 19th, 2007 at 5:12 amI began a quest to read the whole SICP book (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, available online here).
The plan is to:
- Read the book
- See all the video lectures by Sussman and Abelson themselves (available from here)
- Do most of the interesting exercises in the book
- Do some of the larger projects listed here and here
In order to stay faithful to this endeavor, I will post into this SICP category of my blog the “reading notes” - insights gained from the book, solutions to exercises and so on.
A minor twist: I will do all the exercises and projects in Common Lisp, instead of Scheme. The differences aren’t big, but I generally prefer CL to Scheme. Besides, this will ensure that I won’t just copy the code from the book mindlessly, but will rewrite it in CL - which will give me another chance to think it through.
There are several differences between Scheme and Common Lisp. Most of them are very minor, but there is a major one that is worth attention - Scheme is a single namespace Lisp (Lisp-1), while Common Lisp has two separate namespaces, for non-functions and for functions (Lisp-2). This is summed up nicely here, with a much more thorough discussion here, so I won’t dwell on the topic, but I might refer to it later when I present actual code.
Update (31.08.2007): I’ve decided to implement some of the exercises in Scheme, using PLT Scheme. Funny how quickly preferences change. While this post states that I prefer CL to Scheme, it kind-of turned around once I discovered PLT Scheme and worked with it a bit. Using both languages interchangeably will give me a good base of comparison.
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August 8th, 2007 at 01:02
Eli, bravo and thanks for sharing your experience. The choice of CL is a cool twist, which should make you a stronger CL programmer for the effort, I would imagine.
It’s too bad the word press software just has next / previous. I had to use google to find this page about using CL for SICP study, instead of an archive index page listing all 2007 posts by title.