You have several answers here, but none is really comprehensive (and I’m not talking about having enough details or being long enough). First of all, the bottom line: you should not use Common Lisp if you want to have a good experience with SICP. If you don’t know much Common Lisp, then just take it … Read more
Not a lot of people use it that I know, but it is definitely worth a peek (if even just to try programming in another paradigm, so that you learn to think differently). You’re lucky to be able to take a class that uses Scheme, as most universities these days now teach Java. Here’s a … Read more
I think @Vijay’s answer is the best one so far and I just intend to Erlangify it. Pairs (cons cells) in Erlang are written as [Head|Tail] and nil is written as []. There is no restriction as to what the head and tail are but if you use the tail to chain more cons cells … Read more
A good summary is available in Implementation Strategies for First-Class Continuations, an article by Clinger, Hartheimer, and Ost. I recommend looking at Chez Scheme’s implementation in particular. Stack copying isn’t that complex and there are a number of well-understood techniques available to improve performance. Using heap-allocated frames is also fairly simple, but you make a … Read more
The Little Schemer teaches recursion really well, and it’s fun and simple to read. I also liked The Scheme Programming Language for a broader introduction into the language.
scheme < file.scm should work (as long as you don’t specify –interactive and stdin is not a terminal, scheme works non-interactively).
Culpepper & Felleisen, Fortifying Macros, ICFP 2010 Culpepper, Tobin-Hochstadt and Felleisen, Advanced Macrology and the Implementation of Typed Scheme, Scheme Workshop 2007 Flatt, Findler, Felleisen, Scheme with Classes, Mixins, and Traits, APLAS 2006 Herman, Meunier, Improving the Static Analysis of Embedded Languages via Partial Evaluation, ICFP 2004
In Scheme and Racket, a symbol is like an immutable string that happens to be interned so that symbols can be compared with eq? (fast, essentially pointer comparison). Symbols and strings are separate data types. One use for symbols is lightweight enumerations. For example, one might say a direction is either ‘north, ‘south, ‘east, or … Read more
PLT Scheme features a built-in, continuation-based web server. Update: PLT Scheme is now called Racket.
TL;DR: They are different; use list when in doubt. A rule of thumb: use list whenever you want the arguments to be evaluated; quote “distributes” over its arguments, so ‘(+ 1 2) is like (list ‘+ ‘1 ‘2). You’ll end up with a symbol in your list, not a function. An in-depth look at list … Read more