CSC 151 - Computation via Expressions
While it is tempting to start diving into hacking immediately, it is easy to “learn” a programming language by following our intuition, but then become lost when our intuition fails us. Instead, we should take some time to not only build cool stuff, but also understand: This work in ultimately building a mental model of computation of how Scheme programs operate will pay dividends as we ramp up the complexity of our programs as well as begin transitioning to other languages at the end of the course. Consider the following two sequences of English words. Which of these sequences do you understand? Why? The sequences both contain the same words, just in different orders. However, we recognize the first sequence as a valid sentence in the English language, whereas the second sequence seems to be purely random. Because the first sequence is a sentence, we can figure out the meaning of the collection of words by the rules of sentence formation in English: When words don’t appear in the appr
CSC 151 - Computation via Expressions Computation via Expressions Due Friday, 5 September 2025 --> Summary In this reading, we develop a basic mental model of computation for Scheme programs. While it is tempting to start diving into hacking immediately, it is easy to “learn” a programming language by following our intuition, but then become lost when our intuition fails us. Instead, we should take some time to not only build cool stuff, but also understand: The structure of the code we are writing and How our programs execute. This work in ultimately building a mental model of computation of
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