[Fsedu-developers] Proposal for course: Scheme

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

Scheme is the primary extension language of GNU, and it's simple (only 8
language primitives needed). It also does numbers and strings pretty perfectly
(for example it does not make a distinction between integers and floats but
between exact numbers and non-exact numbers). That's why I believe it needs to
be in the Curriculum. The advantages of Scheme also make it easy to write a book
about it. So I'm going to do that.

I will use Texinfo in the book, mainly to try how good it is in writing books.
The Scheme dialect used is, of course, Guile. The book will consist of two
parts: theory and practice. The theory covers roughly the following topics:
* Data types (including conses and vectors)
* Functions
* Control functions
* Structures
* Objects

The practice part consists of writing scheme scripts for two programs. The first
program is a small GTK canvas window which has a scheme interface, the second
program is GNU Robots. 

Two competition will be attached to the practice, one for each program. The
SchemeCanvas competition is about who writes the coolest scheme drawing program
and the Robots competition about who writes the best robot. I believe some
competitions make the books more interesting and also provide a reason for
practicing hard.

Note that the book will not cover writing Guile interfaces to C code, that's
something for another book.

Greetings,

Peter