The Spirit in the Computer
More Resources

SICP at Berkeley

Berkeley also run a course based on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp06/

The Lectures are Available online here

Some interesting stuff on queues

Here are two interesting papers regarding the implementation of queues:

• http://mumble.net/~jar/pubs/scheme-of-things/opaque-types.ps
• http://www.merl.com/papers/TR91-04/ —third part

Termite Scheme

Functional programming seems a good starting point for parallelisation—that is, exploiting multiple processor architectures. Termite Scheme tries to implement Erlang style parallel programming in Scheme. Try googling for termite scheme

Here are a couple of links Holger found earlier:

• http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/841
• http://patricklogan.blogspot.com/2005/07/termite-lisp-for-distributed-computing.html

Co-routines in Scheme

The Scheme Programming Language provides an elegant implementation of co-routines implemented entirely in Scheme.

http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/examples.html#./examples:h11

How’s this for an exercise?

Exercise 9.11.4 Implement the kernel of a small operating system using engines for processes. Processes should request services (such as reading input from the user) by evaluating an expression of the form (trap ‘request). Use call/cc and engine-return from the preceding exercise to implement trap.

Adding syntax to Scheme (defining macros)

Some examples of / tutorials on define-syntax:

• http://people.csail.mit.edu/jhbrown/scheme/macros03.scm
• http://www.scheme.com/tspl3/syntax.html
• http://home.comcast.net/~prunesquallor/macro.txt

Scheme in Scheme

Regarding stuff from chapter 4 (implementing a scheme interpreter):

• Henriy Baker had an article in Lisp Pointers Vol.5, No. 4 (1992) “Metacircular Semantics for Common Lisp Special Forms” http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/MetaCircular.html (or http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/MetaCircular.ps.gz for the Post Script version) in which he shows how the Common Lisp special forms can be implemented via other Common Lisp special forms. Quite an interesting read, although you will have to learn about back-quotes to understand the implementations.