Scheme-ing

Nice Spring Break reading: The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. The Little Schemer is just like The Little Lisper with all the exercises removed. I read The Little Lisper last summer and would like to refresh my memory on some Lisp/Scheme since I have not been using it seriously for a while. I think the authors might have revised some of the contents but there was nothing major. Looking forward to getting the third installment of this series, The Reasoned Schemer.

What is a nice environment for trying out scheme on OS X? There are a couple of implementations as listed here. DrScheme is the only one so far that runs on OS X with a nice little IDE and some help files. The only other one that seems viable is SchemeWay but hooks itself up as a plug-in for Eclipse. And I really do not feel like starting up Eclipse every time I want to try something.

An interesting feature that DrScheme offers -- among the other innovative features that I will not be using yet -- is the ability to embed test cases inside the code. While this might seem like a trivial thing, DrScheme has a nice facility for doing so as can be seen from the screenshot below.

The list of features for DrScheme can be found here.