Scheme

[Fractile81]

Hey, all. I'm taking a class here at school and they're teaching us about a language called Scheme. It's relativly cool, yet somewhat hard to grasp. Anyone out there played with it, or better yet USED it? I'm just curious as to how helpful learning this language will be after this class.

Thanks

[stamenkd]

I'm pretty sure scheme is a functional language. We did Haskell which is also a functional language. Functional languages in general haven't had any great commercial success. What is nice about learning it, is that it provides you with an alternate way of thinking about programming in a way that isn't Object Oriented or procedural. It's basically great for mathematical functions, and stuff like searches and sorts are really efficient.

Then again, if it isn't a functional language ignore everything I said

[Fractile81]

Oh, I believe it is... er, at least it sounds like it is. I've been told it's a lot like LISP(??). Here's some example code:

(define add1
(lambda (x)
(+ x 1)
))

This just defines add1 to take a value (x) and return x+1. It would be called:

(add1 5)

And the return would be 6. Our teacher said something about it being used for AI programming?

[stamenkd]

aha in haskell u sort of say
add1::Integer->Integer --takes Int parameter and returns Int
add1 x : x+1

And yoiu invoke it add1 5. It's not as fussy with brackets if you know what you're doing. Hey they do use it for AI, especially LISP because of the way that the storage of funtions and data reflects how the program is used. And the program can modify itself, or take a program as a parameter, just like a procedural language takes a function as a parameter.

Thats one of the things that distinguishes them from other types of programming.

[Fractile81]

Other that what we've talked about, what's LISP like? Any references on it? I want to do some AI programming and I know that any ideas I can get from Scheme/LISP/whatever else will help (since I'll be actually doing everything in C++ anyway =D ).