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I was introduced to lisp through "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation". Honestly, I think it is a superior intro-book for genuine beginners, compared
by ACow_Adonis 8y ago
I was introduced to lisp through "A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation".
Honestly, I think it is a superior intro-book for genuine beginners, compared to SICP, and a quick perusal of the two will allow most people to come to a conclusion not only about the level at which they are pitched, but which one is pedagogically superior for them in terms of both structure and writing.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/LispBook/book.pdf
- kbp 8y ago> Because Common Lisp is such a complex language, there are a few places where I have chosen to simplify things to better meet the needs of beginners. For example the 1+ and 1- functions are banished from this book because their names are very confusing. Are they? I don't know if I remember hearing anyone complain about those before.
- kazinator 8y agoI haven't seen it articulated either, but I am not a fan of these either. They look like cheesy, whitespace-dependent: infix: (1+ 1) yields 2 and kind of looks like (1 + 1). What? In TXR Lisp, which is quite CL-like in some places and deliberately so, I used the names succ, ssucc, and sssucc for adding 1, 2, 3, and 4. The inverses are pred, ppred, and pppred. These are vaguely inspired by Hofstader's S0, SS0, SSS0 ... in Gödel, Escher, Bach as well a by caar, cddr, ... plus the dim memory of operators called succ and pred in Pascal).