SICP: The beginning

Partly inspired by the recent HN survey on SICP and the related post about MIT moving away from it I looked for SICP at Sapna Book Stall the other day.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it at all considering the wall of computer books were decidedly career oriented; and more so because it was the indian edition that was priced at Rs.595 :)

So I've actually started reading it on my commute - and I'm beginning to see a glimmer of the difference to the approach that this book (and possibly Lisp) has to programming compared to other texts. Its speaking the same language, but not quite in the same way; not to mention that it manages to slip in some really cool things without even so much as a by-your-leave. Case in point: Page 21 has this exercise:

Observe that our model of evaluation allows for combinations whose operators are compound expressions. Use this observation to describe the behavior of the following procedure:

 (define (a-plus-abs-b a b) ( (if (> b 0) + -) a b )) 

Right there, without any ceremony is a statement returning a function - and an operator at that! And answering why is considered an exercise to the reader - nice :).

Hopefully, I'll be able to keep the steam up in reading this book; and possibly even trying the exercises out.

Bonus: A footnote had this gem from Alan Perlis: Syntactic Sugar causes cancer of the semicolon :)