Re: [Fsedu-developers] Proposal for course: Scheme

[Stephen Compall]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Tuesday 01 April 2003 10:54 am, Peter Minten wrote:
> 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

There are two ways to go about it, I think: teach theory, then
practice; or just do both at the same time.  Far be it for me to
decide which is better; I've seen bad implementations of both
strategies.

> 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.

Yes, the second one is especially cool.

> 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.

All depends on what you mean by "best" ;)

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

If Guile users aren't comfortable with adding subrs to their modules
and programs, then they might just switch to pure C/C++ programs just
to be able to use some random library.  So I think it should be
included as a section..."skip this if you don't know C"

I'm speaking here as an advocate of replacing most C programming with
higher-level languages, and only interfacing into C for the stuff that
has speed problems.  I don't know if fsedu is the place to advance
this agenda, but anyway....

- -- 
Stephen Compall - Also known as S11001001
DotGNU `Contributor' -- http://dotgnu.org
Jabber ID: address@hidden

I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information
in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control
whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people
from sharing it, is sabotage.
        -- RMS, Byte interview, 1986

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE+ieTL2AceYinZ4EgRAmJEAJ9aXZpbUSL4dkRhp8eRyY1lB9f9TgCeOPST
UsZAARjRbpzrfsm965s9c+E=
=ueB7
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----