strongly enough.Hm, the book looks a bit old, is that a problem? Otherwise, I really like the writing. Seems like a book I can get into.
edited 2nd Jun '11 5:31:29 PM by ViralLamb
Power corrupts. Knowledge is Power. Study hard. Be evil.
victorinox243
Punch cards, baby. Punch cards.
DUMB
No, not really; Scheme is still used (in fact the community's been flamewarring over the new standard, not that that's important), the math hasn't changed, and you can't do most of it in newer languages anyway.
[1] This facsimile operated in part by synAC.
Ok, problems with SICP....I can't get that MIT/GNU thing to work. Also, they don't support versions older then Windows XP, so is that problem? Do I have to get an older version of the language, or does Scheme not really change in all this time?
Also, why does the book talk about NONE of this? Doesn't tell you what you need, doesn't suggest anything. Just "Scheme", that's it. Nothing the internet can't solve, so that doesn't really matter I suppose. The book doesn't seem to assume you don't know shit. Intended?
edited 3rd Jun '11 1:59:34 AM by ViralLamb
Power corrupts. Knowledge is Power. Study hard. Be evil.
Yeah it more or less is intended. SICP is about as close as most books come to being that mythical "general-purpose" programming guide, so it's intentionally distanced from details like which implementation to use (also, it was originally a university textbook: your professor is probably expected to have handled this detail already).
On the plus side, this means you don't actually need to use MIT/GNU Scheme. Any reasonably standard Scheme will handle the examples pretty much the same way. My personal favourite is Gambit; another good option might be SISC, which you can play with in your browser.
These ones don't come with an editor, but Notepad++ has a Scheme language mode so you should be OK starting with that (most of the early exercises will only need the REPL anyway). Once you get onto larger things, I have found the SchemeWay plugin for Eclipse to be pretty good.
Scheme has changed, but not that much. The best version for use with SICP is R5RS, which is the most common version (all three named above implement that). R6RS is newer but that's the big flamewar-inducing change to the language mentioned previously. The only thing to be really worried about is whether an implementation has full conformance to the standard, because SICP will make heavy use of things like tail-calls and first-class continuations, that many implementations leave out because they're harder to implement correctly.
edited 3rd Jun '11 4:51:11 AM by Jinren
edited 2nd Jun '11 1:09:50 PM by ViralLamb
Power corrupts. Knowledge is Power. Study hard. Be evil.