I've decided I ought to train myself in the most elegant programming
weapon --- http://xkcd.com/297/ --- so I've started working through
_The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_.

In the long term I hope I'll be able to customize Emacs more in its
native way instead of wrapping external Perl programs in
shell-command-on-region (as I often do now).

Any tips on transferring knowledge between Scheme and elisp?

As a first observation, it seems to me that Scheme's define seems to
correspond to both defun and setq in elisp

Adam Funk wrote:

dunno, but the emacs lisp intro (C-h i m emacs lisp intro RET) and the
emacs lisp manual (C-h i m elisp RET) seem more appropriate ways to get
started with elisp...

() Adam Funk ducksburg.com>
() Fri, 1 Aug 2008 13:45:57 +0100

most elegant programming weapon

warriors attack, felling foe after foe,
few growing old til they realize: to know
what deceit is worth deflection;
such receipt reversed rejection!
then their heavy arms, e'er transformed to shields:
balanced hooked charms, ploughed deep, rich yields.

thi

Good idea: the best computer science book ever written --- and the only
one I've ever used :-P

Uh, what? Can you explain this? Can you explain why on Earth you
would do it?

There are some general qualities to Lisp that all Lisp dialects
share, Scheme and Emacs Lisp among them. Both are descendants of
MacLisp (though Scheme is way different from MacLisp, and Emacs Lisp
is quite similar).

"Joel J. Adamson " email.unc.edu> writes:

On 2008-08-01, Joost Kremers wrote:

Well, what I mainly want to do is learn LISP from a reputable text,
and I'm hoping a side benefit of that will be improved Emacs skills.

On 2008-08-01, Joel J. Adamson wrote:

Good!

If you mean why do I do such a hideous thing now, it's because I *can*
do string manipulation in Perl, whereas I can't (currently) do it in
LISP (except for fairly trivial cases).

Adam Funk ducksburg.com> writes:

Notice that this is not a book about scheme, but about programming in
general. It just happens that it uses scheme for its examples (but
there are blogs and wikis with the sicp examples translated in other
programming languages).
http://codepoetics.com/wiki/index.php?title=Topics:SICP_in_other_languages
http://eli.thegreenplace.net/category/programming/lisp/sicp/

To learn scheme there are easier books such as:

How to Design Programs -- An Introduction to Computing and Programming
http://www.htdp.org/2003-09-26/Book/

Concrete Abstractions -- An Introduction to Computer Science Using Scheme
http://www.gustavus.edu/+max/concrete-abstractions.html

"Joel J. Adamson " email.unc.edu> writes:

Oh yes, and be sure to use paredit.
http://mumble.net/~campbell/emacs/paredit.el

Here is a quick tutorial for using scheme in emacs:

C-x C-f ~/test.scm RET
C-x 2
C-u M-x inferior-lisp RET
C-a C-k mzscheme RET -- assuming you have mzscheme in the PATH.
(display "Hello") RET
C-x o -- return to test.scm buffer.
(define (hw)
(newline) (display "Hello") (newline)) C-x C-e
(hw) c-x C-e
-- so you can keep your source and test
-- expressions in the scm buffer, and
-- send the over to the inferior-lisp
-- process for execution with C-x C-e.

On Aug 1, 6:51 pm, p...@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)
wrote: