Week 1 Discussion/Lab Notes

Administrivia

• Briefly reviewed some of the general policies for this course and my own lab policies.

Why Scheme?

Some of you may be wondering why we're learning Scheme and not some other language more commonly used in industry. I did at first when I took CS61A. Alan Perlis said, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." I hope that you all will find Scheme worth knowing as I did.

One of the main reasons why we use Scheme is because "[it] can express just any programming style in existence, including functional, procedural, logic, constraint, [object-oriented], ..." (source). Because of this ability, it is an excellent tool for exploring the topics of this course.

Scheme Syntax

In comparison to most other languages, Scheme has a fairly simple syntax. The textbook and lecture notes cover all the syntax you need to know, so I won't bother describing it in detail here. I do, however, suggest that everyone not familiar with the language to read about types of expressions versus types of values by Kate Talbert and Brian Denny.