Your confusion is reasonable: ‘let’ and ‘define’ both create new bindings. One advantage to ‘let’ is that its meaning is extraordinarily well-defined; there’s absolutely no disagreement between various Scheme systems (incl. Racket) about what plain-old ‘let’ means. The ‘define’ form is a different kettle of fish. Unlike ‘let’, it doesn’t surround the body (region where … 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
scheme < file.scm should work (as long as you don’t specify –interactive and stdin is not a terminal, scheme works non-interactively).
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
The form ‘foo is simply a faster way to type the special form (quote foo) which is to say, “do not evaluate the name foo replacing it with its value; I really mean the name foo itself”. I think SISC is perfectly fine for exploring the exercises in TLS.
Racket is ultimately based on R5RS, and not R6RS and not a strict superset of either. I don’t think it can be called ‘Scheme’ because it’s not backwards compatible with any Scheme standard. Most implementations offer extensions, but are otherwise backwards compatible, of course, the compiler that comes with Racket can also run in R5RS … Read more