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Treated myself to another book, Paul Graham’s ANSI Common LISP.

I may not have been blogging it but I’ve been doing some reading. I’m not sure what to make of this list:

• Lee Parks’ Total Control. Readable with nice glossy pictures. I didn’t learn anything particularly new but I will use the drill diagrams in my next parking lot practice.
• David S. Touretzkys Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation. Possibly the best $2.75 I’ve spent on a programming textbook. Genuinely entertaining for an introductory text though the LISP dialect is outdated and I was sometimes frustrated piecing it together on a modern implementation. I may throw a current edition to my son when he’s old enough.
• Eugene Charniak’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. I don’t have an interest in A.I. but it has a LISP orientation and presents two very good chapters on Parsing and Searching. For $2.25, I couldn’t pass it by.
• Guy L. Steele’s Common Lisp: The Language. Actually, that link is to the reference I should have bought. I mistakenly picked up the 1984 edition. Fortunately, it was only $2.80 and electronic versions of CLtL2 are in the CMU AI Repository.

I felt that my lack of experience with Lisp and Scheme was worth remedying so I picked up cheaply a used copy of Simply Scheme by Brian Harvey & Matthew Wright. It’s a bit elementary but it is intended for liberal arts majors and those who find they need a bridge to SCIP.

An annoying quirk of the book is the authors’ decision to use a nonstandard library of their own creation to hide the “complexity” of Scheme. I picked up copies of simply.scm and functions.scm from ftp://anarres.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/scheme/.

Unfortunately, I’m temporarily stalled. I intended to work with SCSH, the scheme shell as a shell in Emacs, and I may, but have to work out the library dependencies and possibly language features. PLT’s DrScheme might work but also has problems with the original library. This version of the library at UChicago is supposedly adapted for DrScheme but it looks like I need to remove the redefinitions of some built-in functions.