[gambit-list] Newbie Checking in

Hendrik Boom hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
Tue Feb 17 11:25:43 EST 2015


On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 09:02:34AM -0700, Duke Normandin wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Feb 2015 10:48:35 -0500
> Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 08:36:36AM -0700, Duke Normandin wrote:
> > > Is this list active?  Access to the archives seems to be hosed!!
> > 
> > Yes, it is active.
> > 
> > Don't know what's with the archive; someone in charge of the
> > archive should maybe investigate.
> > 
> > But there's another archive on gmane, the newsgroup 
> > 'gmane.lisp.scheme.gambit'.  You can point your usenet reader to
> > the news.gmane.org to access gmane's extensive set of news groups.
> > 
> > Or use a web browser on gmane's web archive, http://gmane.org/
> 
> Thanks for the input Hendrik!
> I've got _some_ experience with newLISP, but I seem compeled to
> investigate scheme a bit more. If you know of a good newbie scheme
> tut let me know please. I'm only an avid, self-taught hobbyist.

Exactly how I started out in the 1960's.

> TIA ..
> -- 

***

There's How To Design Programs, but it starts more elementary than you 
need, and it doesn't seem to get into continuations, which is what 
Scheme was invented for.

Both are available for free download or reading on the web.  The first 
edition is available for purchase on paper, if you prefer.
The second edition is still being written and revised, and it seems to 
be more fun.

However, How To Design Programs is based on Racket, which is a very
different dialect of Scheme from Racket, and actually on a series of 
teaching sublanguages at that, with some specialized libraries.

***

The other book I'd recommend is The Structure and Interpretation of 
Cmoputer Programs.  It goes into a lot more depth than How To Design 
Programs, but a brief look through it suggests it doesn't get into 
continuations either.

Have a look at both; they're both available on the web for free.

***

I wish I knew of a good current source about the use of continuations 
and continuation passing.  Decades ago, there were a bunch of technical 
memoranda from MIT with titles like 'Lambda the Ultimate'.  There's 
links to this stuff on http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

Steele's master's thesis is linked there, too.  It describes one of 
the early implementatinos of Scheme.

-- hendrik



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