This book is intended to provide an introduction to the Scheme Programming Language in a clear and concise manner. Scheme is a general purpose, high level programming language, supporting operations on structural data such as strings, lists and vectors, as well as operations on more traditional data such as numbers and characters. It is fairly a simple language to learn and a truly versatile language that has been employed to write text editors, optimizing compilers, operating systems, graphics packages, expert systems, numerical applications, financial analysis packages, virtual reality systems and practically every other type of application imaginable.
Written for professionals and students with some prior programming experience, it begins by leading the programmer gently through the basics of Scheme and continues with an introduction to some of the more advanced features of the language.
The fourth edition stands substantially revised to bring the content up-to-date with the current Scheme standard (http://www.rbrs.org/). This book is not intended to supplant the current standard but rather to provide more comprehensive introduction and reference manual for the language with additional explanatory text and a large number of examples spread throughout the text. One entire chapter is dedicated to the presentation of a set of longer examples.
Answers to many of the exercises, a complete formal syntax of the Scheme, and a summary of forms and procedures are provided in appendices.
“This fourth edition builds on the strengths of the previous editions and provides a comprehensive, no-nonsense introduction to the Scheme programming language in its latest form. The combination of solidity and finesse displayed in this book makes it a reference text for educated computer scientists. The accompanying software, Petite Chez Scheme, makes it the ideal starting point for any programmer who wants to extend his or her repertoire with Scheme.”
—Olivier Danvy, Aarhus University, Denmark, Coeditor-in-Chief of Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
“Kent Dybvig’s The Scheme Programming Language is to Scheme what Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language is to C. Dybvig’s book is the book for either the novice or serious Scheme programmer. Its style, wit, and organization has reached a new high with the publication of the fourth edition.”
—Daniel P. Friedman, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University
“Students in my Programming Language Concepts class need to learn the basics of Scheme in a few days, and to pick up harder concepts throughout the course. For nineteen years, The Scheme Programming Language has been an excellent guide for them. Dybvig’s rapid-fire prose and examples serve both the Scheme beginner and the experienced programmer in need of a reference. Seldom do my students make a point of praising a computer science textbook; that happens over and over with this one.”
—Claude W. Anderson, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
About the Author
R. KENT DYBVIG, Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University and principal developer of Chez Scheme.
Table of Contents:
Preface.Introduction.Getting Started.Going Further.Procedures and Variables Bindings.Control Operations. Operations on Objects.Input and Output.Syntactic Extension.Records.Libraries and Top-Level Programs.Exceptions and Conditions.Extended Examples.References.Answers to Selected Exercises.Formal Syntax.Summary of Forms. Index.
