The Daily SICP @dailysicp

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, written by Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Susmann. Tribute account, not affiliated with MIT mitpress.mit.edu/sicp Massachusetts, USA Joined July 2018

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

33 The single quote is different from the double quote we have been using to enclose character strings to be printed.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Exercise 1.11. A function f is defined by the rule that f(n) = n if n<3 and f(n) = f(n - 1) + 2f(n - 2) + 3f(n - 3) if n> 3. Write a procedure that computes f by means of a recursive process. Write a procedure that computes f by means of an iterative process.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

We ordinarily view the world as populated by independent objects, each of which has a state that changes over time.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Programs are typically designed to model complex phenomena, and more often than not one must construct computational objects that have several parts in order to model real-world phenomena that have several aspects.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

In 1964 a megabyte of RAM cost about $400,000. Now every personal computer has many megabytes of RAM, and most of the time most of that RAM is unused. It is hard to underestimate the cost of mass-produced electronics.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

[The mathematician] need not be idle; there are many operations which he may carry out with these symbols, without ever having to look at the things they stand for. (Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking)

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Note that this is a text about programming, unlike most Lisp books, which are used as a preparation for work in artificial intelligence.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Note that this is a text about programming, unlike most Lisp books, which are used as a preparation for work in artificial intelligence.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, live being, but a kind of clockwork [...] (Johannes Keppler)

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Exercise 1.6. Alyssa P. Hacker doesn't see why if needs to be provided as a special form. ``Why can't I just define it as an ordinary procedure in terms of cond?'' she asks.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

We owe a great debt to Robert Fano, who reorganized MIT's introductory curriculum in electrical engineering and computer science to emphasize the principles of engineering design. He [...] wrote the first set of subject notes from which this book evolved.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

38 You may wonder why anyone would care about raising numbers to the 1000th power. See section 1.2.6.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Effective program synthesis also requires organizational principles that can guide us in formulating the overall design of a program.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

Lisp was not the product of a concerted design effort. Instead, it evolved informally in an experimental manner in response to users' needs and to pragmatic implementation considerations.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer.

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

We now come to the decisive step of mathematical abstraction: we forget about what the symbols stand for. (Hermann Weyl, The Mathematical Way of Thinking)

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The Daily SICP @dailysicp

5 years ago

17 The term broken heart was coined by David Cressey, who wrote a garbage collector for MDL, a dialect of Lisp developed at MIT during the early 1970s.