CS 61A Lecture 1: Functional Programming I

Ok

usually I just jump writing and start typing at the computer, but well, I'll try to get that fixed up

I'll tell you some of the administrative things

So the great big handout that you should have gotten or should be getting soon

has general information about the course and stuff like should you be taking this course versus some

other course

what the assignments are and how they're graded

and, toward the back, on page 17 is the outline, weekly outline of

what topic is when

I only have one line on the screen I just made some more so they might've just not seen them

and also in this big handout is the first week homework and lab

which actually you should have already anyway the lab from getting into lab. Who is not

into lab yet ?

Ok, so most of you have, that's good

The one page handout

has last minute details including which TA is teaching which section

and the name of your reader and all the times (of) discussions and labs

and how many spaces are available as of this morning in each section

You'll see most of those numbers are zero but there are four sections that still haven't listed one vacant

space

for people who aren't in a section yet

The one that has the most empty spaces is wednesday-friday nine thirty to eleven am, so

if you're not in the section, try that one

ah ah they're gonna try a different video keyboard

This week, despite what your scheduled classes says,

you're meeting in the lab both times, so don't go to discussion section this week

go to lab again

?? starting next week, it's lab in the first half of the week and discussion

in the second half of the week

I'll pass ... computer account forms just for people who didn't get one in the lab

if I have any TAs here, TAs are supposed to come and bring me spare account forms

now it would be a good time to give me them

So the things you need to buy are the textbook, Structure And Interpretation Of Computer Programs

named after the course

So you need the textbook and there's 2 volumes of the course reader

volume 1 is the stuff that changes from semester to semester

so you definitely need a new copy of volume 1, you can't (be copied ? ) a used one

if you took the last semester and dropped it, buy a new volume 1 anyway

volume 2 is the stuff that mostly doesn't change from semester to semester

however, this semester it did a little bit

so if you get an old one of this you'll be missing my lecture notes and

the article to read about the map reduce thing and for week 13, and we

rearranged the sequence of topics of the sample exams

don't quite line up in the older readers

so it's a good idea but not absolutely essential to get a new volume 2

but on the other hand it costs 30 dollars, so

Ok, great, so now we have a computer

and I'm gonna run STK

which is the name of a particular implementation of the Scheme programming language

Scheme is a dialect of Lisp

Lisp is the second oldest computer programming language that's still in use

so it's existed for a long long time now

starting in.. what, 1960 ?

so going on almost fifty years now

and the reason that's hang around this long is that people fond it very useful

the reason we use it, well, the reason because the book uses it

but the reason the book uses it is that you'll find that it's a language that doesn't have very much

in the way of notation, you know, idiosincratic rules

so you'll gonna learn the entire Scheme language pretty much today

and it won't be a big deal and after that we can talk about big ideas in computer science

and yet even though it's a very simple language it's also a very powerful language

and later on in the semester we'll be learning some things about why that is

however, don't think of this as a course about the programming language

some of you, especially if you're transfert students from the community college

may have taken a bunch of courses named after programming languages

.. took a Pascal course and a C course and a C++ course and a Java course and so on

this is not the Scheme course

today it's the Scheme course, the rest of the semester is stuff that will be useful to you

no matter what language you'll program in later in life

Ok, so, Scheme is an interactive programming language,

which means I type something in and it types something out

So I type in something called an expression and it tells me the value of the expression

So the simplest expression I could type in is something like

a number .. the value of seven is seven

that's not very interesting

we can also do arithmetics on numbers

ops.. close parentheses... we'll try that again... there we go

and already you'll see that Scheme is a little bit different from

the notation you're used to

you're accustomed to many different notations for functions

so the plus function, you use to see it in between the two arguments