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From: tonyk@world.std.com (Tony J. Kanawati)
Subject: Re: Abelson and Sussman
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Date: Sat, 27 May 1995 08:53:14 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.scheme.c:641 comp.lang.scheme:12806

Barry Margolin (barmar@nic.near.net) wrote:
: In article <JDONHAM.95May26155404@hadron.us.oracle.com> jdonham@us.oracle.com (Jake Donham) writes:
: >Abelson & Sussman is to Scheme what Kernighan & Ritchie is to
: >C.

: I disagree.  SICP is a textbook on programming concepts, which uses Scheme
: to illustrate how to implement them; Scheme was chosen for this purpose
: because it's a simple language that was invented for the purpose of
: ...

I agree with Barry.  After I learned Scheme, I was able to quickly
implement and experiment with complex algorithms of all kinds, with minimal
tedium.  Most of what I learned transferred easily into C, C++, perl,
shell, ML, and even TeX.

The level of tedium varies, and some cultural shifts must accompany the
language shift.  But to this day, I still experiment with wild ideas in
Scheme before suffering the tedium of C and C++.  I don't need to worry
about lexing and parsing, memory management, pointers, and all the other
incoveniences while experimenting with an algorithm.  Eventually, as the
solution takes shape, only the C/C++ tedium remains; the rest is simple
syntactic conversion.  Of course, depending on the desired results, I may
program under constraints to allow easy xform to C/C++, or use the full
power of the language.
-- 
--
Antoun (Tony) Kanawati
tonyk@world.std.com
