ITEC 380 2009spring ibarland

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ITEC380 Scheme resources

Running Scheme

• If you have your own computer, you can download DrScheme. On-campus, it is also available on the labs in Davis and Stuart halls.
• The first time you start DrScheme, set the language to “Beginning Student”. (This will give the most-informative error messages.)

Learning scheme

• How to Design Programs is aimed at the beginner. It uses Scheme, although really it is teaching a fundamental design methodology which is helpful. (I worked through this book after finishing my Ph.D. in computer science, and it transformed my idea of good programming.)

  Note: Although the book talks about adding the “draw.ss” teachpack, for this class we'll instead use the “world.ss” teachpack. (If you try to add both, you'll get an error about multiply-defined names.)

• Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days is geared for people who already know programming, and is a good concise overview (but it mixes advanced and introductory concepts side-by-side).
• §15.5 of the textbook.
  Note that everything the book uses in all-caps (such as “DEFINE”) should actually be written in lower-case (e.g. “define”). See also the differences-in-dialects table below.
• Within DrScheme, the Helpdesk menu-item is helpful. Also, if cursor is on a name¹, pressing F1 will show the built-in documentation for that name.
• Use check-expect for exact answers, and check-within for inexact numbers. (check-within is just like check-expect but it takes a third input -- the tolerance, e.g. 0.0001.)

Differences in dialects:

old-school2	DrScheme
car	first
cdr	rest
null, nil	empty
null?	empty?
nil	false, #f
t	true, #t

• For this course, the following functions are not allowed: set!, set-car!, set-cdr!, (or set-first!, set-rest!), and any of the set-struct-field! mutators.

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©2009, Ian Barland, Radford University Last modified 2009.Feb.20 (Fri)

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