Scheme is a dialect of Lisp, i.e.
"the greatest single programming language ever designed" -- Alan Kay
Why do we learn it?
"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." -- Eric Raymond
The big idea for this lesson is deceptively simple. It's that we can take the value returned by one function and use it as an argument to another function. By “hooking up” two functions in this way, we invent a new, third function. For example, let's say we have a function that adds the letter s to the end of a word (in pseudo-code):
add-s(“run”) = “runs”and another function that puts two words together into a sentence:
sentence(“day”, “tripper”) = “day tripper”We can combine these to create a new function that represents the third person singular form of a verb:
third-person(verb) = sentence(“she”, add-s(verb))That general formula looks like this when applied to a particular verb:
third-person(“sing”) = “she sings”The way we say it in Scheme is
(define (third-person verb)
(sentence 'she (add-s verb)))We know that this idea probably doesn't look like much of a big deal to you. It might seem obvious. Nevertheless, it will turn out that we can express a wide variety of computational algorithms by linking functions together in this way. This linking is what we mean by “functional programming.”
This week, most of the reading is meant to improve your understanding of concepts that you saw in the first lab. So, you may want to skim parts that you already know. You can use these readings as a reference when you're finishing the the rest of the lab.
The expression (+ 8 2) has the value 10. It is a
compound expression made up of three atoms.
For this problem, write five other Scheme expressions whose values are also the number ten:
Let's build a repertoire of functions to deal with words and sentences. We'll give you the second procedure from the previous lab.
first-two that takes a word as its
argument, returning a two-letter word containing the first two letters of the
argument.two-first that takes two words as
arguments, returning a two-letter word containing the first letters of the two
arguments.two-first-sent
that takes a two-word sentence as argument, returning a two-letter word
containing the first letters of the two words.Write a predicate teen? that returns true if its argument is
between 13 and 19.
Write a procedure indef-article.
See examples below:
Write a procedure insert-and that takes a sentence of
items and returns a new sentence with an and
in the right place.
Write a procedure query that turns a statement into a
question by swapping the first two words and adding a question mark to the last
word:
Write a procedure european-time to convert a time
from American AM/PM notation into European 24-hour notation. Also write
american-time, which does the opposite:
Write a procedure describe-time that takes a number
of seconds as its argument and returns a more useful description of that
amount of time. Assume that there are 365.25 days in a year.
The following program doesn't work. Why not? Fix it.
(define (superlative adjective word)
(se (word adjective 'est) word))If you're stuck, take a look at Simply Scheme Ch. 7 - Variables