What the heck is the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" cover drawing about?

Posted by Paul Reiners on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Paul Reiners
Published on 2010-05-28T14:53:40Z Indexed on 2010/05/28 15:11 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 205

Filed under:

lisp

|

Scheme

|

sicp

|

abelson

|

sussman

What the heck is the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs cover drawing about? I mean I know what "eval", "apply", and '?' all mean, but I'm having a hard time deciphering the rest of the picture.

Who the heck is the maiden? Does she work for the wizard? Why the heck is she pointing at the table? Is she pointing at that little bowl-type thing? Or the books? Or the table in general? Is she trying to tell the wizard that he should apply some sort of Lisp wizardry to the table or the items on it? Or is she just telling him something prosaic, such as his food is getting cold?

What the heck is the one leg on that table that looks like...a leg...with a foot at the end (as legs tend to have)? How does the table balance on one leg? (Or is that another leg in the shadows?)

[Note: I'm waiting for a lengthy build to finish in case you were wondering.]

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about lisp

Why is Lisp useful?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
Lisp obviously is an advantage for the AI stuff but it doesn't appear to me that Lisp is any faster than Java, C#, or even C. I am not a master of Lisp, but I find it incredibly difficult to understand the advantage one would get in writing Business Software in Lisp. Yet it is considered as a hacker's… >>> More
Why do you like Lisp ?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
Why does Paul Graham advocate Lisp? Why did ITA Software choose Lisp over other High Level languages? Lisp obviously is an advantage for the AI stuff but I don't think Lisp is any faster than Java, C# or as a matter of fact faster than C. Still it is considered as a Hackers language? I am not a master… >>> More
Emacs 23.1 make error 139 in Mac OS X 10.6.3

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
When I try to compile GNU Emacs 23.1 on my machine with Mac OS X 10.6.3 I repeatedly get the following ending: Directories: /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/. /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./calc /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./calendar /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./emacs-lisp /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./emulation /src/emacs-23.1/lisp/./erc… >>> More
Why not port Linux kernel to Common Lisp?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Conventional wisdom states that OS kernels must be written in C in order to achieve the necessary levels of performance. This has been the justification for not using more expressive high level languages. However, for a few years now implementations of Common Lisp such as SBCL have proven to be… >>> More
Lisp Style question label local functions or not?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I was wondering if there is a standard practice regarding the use of labels in Lisp. I've been messing around with a Lisp implementation of the algorithm described in the first answer here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/352203/generating-permutations-lazily My current version uses labels to… >>> More

Related posts about Scheme

About "If.." in Scheme (plt-scheme)

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I had a pretty simple requirement in my Scheme program to execute more than one statement, in the true condition of a 'if'. . So I write my code, something like this: (if (= 1 1) ((expression1) (expression2)) ; these 2 expressions are to be executed when the condition is true (expression3)… >>> More
Detecting EOF in a Binary File using Scheme

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
(define (read-all-input) (local ((define line (bytes->list (read-bytes 4)))) (if (eof-object? line) empty (cons line (read-all-input))))) (void (read-all-input)) The above code fails because bytes-list expects an argument of type byte string, but is given # >>> More
Scheme: Detecting duplicate elements in a list

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Does R6RS or Chez Scheme v7.9.4 have a library function to check if a list contains duplicate elements? Alternatively, do either have any built in functionality for sets (which dis-allow duplicate elements)? So far, I've only been able to find an example here. The problem with that is that it doesn't… >>> More
Scheme implementations - what does it mean?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi, I'm a beginning student in CS, and my classes are mostly in Java. I'm currently going through "Little Schemer" as a self study, and in the process of finding out how to do that I have found numerous references to "implementations" of Scheme. My question is, what are implementations? Are they… >>> More
Traversing Scheme function as a list

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Isn't it possible to treat functions in Scheme as any other list? Basically, what I want do to is something like this: (define (foo) "hello") (cdr foo) ; or similar, should return the list ((foo) "hello") I've found a similar discussion about this, and I feel a bit disappointed if this is not… >>> More