Re: What is a lightweight language

[address@hidden (Jeremy Hylton)]

>>>>> "SK" == Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu> writes:

  SK> I think Joe Marshall's objection is strange, and hopefully
  SK> isolated.  Maybe at MIT, they specialize in scaring their
  SK> students by throwing big words like "continuation" (more than
  SK> two syllables) at them.  Most of the rest of us get by without
  SK> resorting to this.  As a result, our students learn Scheme the
  SK> *exact same way* they learn any other language: a little bit at
  SK> a time.

Dan Weinreb already mentioned that continuations aren't mentioned in
SICP.  When I took 6.001, they didn't sneak them into the course notes
either.  I didn't learn about continuations until I hit Gifford's
graudate course on programming languages.  That seems just about right
to me:  No need to get into continuations when you're learning what
programming is, but no way to avoid them when you're learning about
what programming languages are.

it-took-me-a-while-to-learn-that-Scheme-had-vectors-too-ly y'rs,
Jeremy