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From: Lucy.Hederman@cs.tcd.ie (Lucy Hederman)
Subject: Could CommonLISP replace Scheme in SICP ?
Message-ID: <Lucy.Hederman-141094145906@hederman.cs.tcd.ie>
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Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 14:59:06 GMT
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I have been teaching a course based on Chapters 1 to 3 of SICP (Abelson and
Sussman's book) for a number of years. But I don't use Scheme or LISP
myself any other time. I don't know much about CommonLISP except that it is
ugly compared with Scheme.

I am under pressure from the AI lecturer (a cognitive psychologist) to
teach CommonLISP in this course. He can't see why, if Scheme is a dialect
of LISP, that it wouldn't be possible to teach SICP using CommonLISP.

I know it wouldn't be pretty. But I'd like to be able to tell him that it's
just not possible - that there are things which you just can't do in
CommonLISP while preserving the essence of SICP. I have an idea that I knew
the answer once upon a time but I have forgotten.

Can anyone help me out here ? Or am I worng and just being lazy ?

Thanks

Lucy

-- 
Lucy Hederman                       Lucy.Hederman@cs.tcd.ie
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2, IRELAND
