Preface to the First Edition
This book presents an overview of the Scheme programming language
with strong emphasis on functional programming. Language elements
and programming techniques are explained by means of simple examples
which are used to form more complex programs.
Functional programming is an approach that focuses on the evaluation of
expressions.Programsare formed by combining functions.Most functions
are free of side effects which allows to examine programs formally and
prove properties of algorithms.
The first chapter of this book introduces basic concepts such as definitions,
conditional evaluation, recursion, procedures, and elementary data types.
While the second chapter continues this tour, it puts emphasis on more
complex programs by introducing problems of varying complexity and
then outlining the way to their solution step by step.
The last chapter takes up some lose ends and briefly introduces continua-
tions, one of the more advanced features of Scheme. It also demonstrates
how Scheme can be viewed as a formal system by constructing a Y com-
binator.
To make best use of this book, experimenting with the given examples is
strongly recommended. See the appendix for download URLs and a brief
introduction to the program development cycle.
The Scheme language achieves what only few languages have managed
before: to bring fun back to programming. Its simple syntax, clean seman-
tics, and powerful functions open the door to a fresh perspective on pro-
gram design. Programming in Scheme is fun, and this book is an attempt
to share some of that fun.
Nils M Holm, Feb. 2006
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Diana Jeschag for proof reading, to Al Petrofsky for explaining
some of the more subtle details of binding constructs and continuations,
and to Jens Axel Søgaard, Anton van Straaten, and other regulars of
the
comp.lang.scheme
newsgroup for helping me to get used to the
concept of continuations.
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nana5206082013-10-13想学习scheme，这本书不错
