The Reasoned Schemer, second edition

by Daniel P. Friedman, William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov, Jason Hemann, Duane Bibby (Illustrator)

Overview

A new edition of a book, written in a humorous question-and-answer style, that shows how to implement  and use an elegant little programming language for logic programming.

The goal of this book is to show the beauty and elegance of relational programming, which captures the essence of logic programming.  The book shows how to implement a relational programming language in Scheme, or in any other functional language, and demonstrates the remarkable flexibility of the resulting relational programs. As in the first edition, the pedagogical method is a series of questions and answers, which proceed with the characteristic humor that marked The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer. Familiarity with a functional language or with the first five chapters of The Little Schemer is assumed. 

For this second edition, the authors have greatly simplified the programming language used in the book, as well as the implementation of the language. In addition to revising the text extensively, and simplifying and revising the “Laws” and “Commandments,” they have added explicit “Translation” rules to ease translation of Scheme functions into relations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262348782
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/09/2018
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Daniel P. Friedman is Professor of Computer Science in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University and is the author of many books published by the MIT Press, including The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schemer (with Matthias Felleisen); The Little Prover (with Carl Eastlund); and The Reasoned Schemer (with William E. Byrd, Oleg Kiselyov, and Jason Hemann).

William E. Byrd is a scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Oleg Kiselyov is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University, Japan.

Jason Hemann is a PhD candidate in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University.

Gerald Jay Sussman is Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Preface xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Since the First Edition xv

1 Playthings 2

2 Teaching Old Toys New Tricks 24

3 Seeing Old Friends in New Ways 36

4 Double Your Fun 52

5 Members Only 66

6 The Fun Never Ends … 78

7 A Bit Too Much 84

8 Just a Bit More 106

9 Thin Ice 128

10 Under the Hood 144

Connecting the Wires 176

Welcome to the Club 178

Afterword 181

Index 184

What People are Saying About This

Michael Vanier

Contrary to popular belief, logic programming doesn't always mean programming in Prolog. In this groundbreaking book, Friedman and Kiselyov extend Scheme to form a completely new kind of logic programming system, one which is in many ways even more elegant than Prolog. Written in the same classic question-and-answer format as the authors' previous book The Little Schemer, The Reasoned Schemer covers goals, first-class relations, interleaved and non-interleaved backtracking, the relationship between relational and functional programming, and much more. Reading this book will not only cause your geek rating to skyrocket and impress all the Cool Kids, it will also open your eyes to a paradigm of programming which most programmers are completely unaware of, but which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the programming systems of the future. More importantly, though, this book is great fun to read and will make you a better programmer.

From the Publisher

Contrary to popular belief, logic programming doesn't always mean programming in Prolog. In this groundbreaking book, Friedman and Kiselyov extend Scheme to form a completely new kind of logic programming system, one which is in many ways even more elegant than Prolog. Written in the same classic question-and-answer format as the authors' previous book The Little Schemer, The Reasoned Schemer covers goals, first-class relations, interleaved and non-interleaved backtracking, the relationship between relational and functional programming, and much more. Reading this book will not only cause your geek rating to skyrocket and impress all the Cool Kids, it will also open your eyes to a paradigm of programming which most programmers are completely unaware of, but which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the programming systems of the future. More importantly, though, this book is great fun to read and will make you a better programmer.

—Michael Vanier, Caltech

Endorsement

Contrary to popular belief, logic programming doesn't always mean programming in Prolog. In this groundbreaking book, Friedman and Kiselyov extend Scheme to form a completely new kind of logic programming system, one which is in many ways even more elegant than Prolog. Written in the same classic question-and-answer format as the authors' previous book The Little Schemer, The Reasoned Schemer covers goals, first-class relations, interleaved and non-interleaved backtracking, the relationship between relational and functional programming, and much more. Reading this book will not only cause your geek rating to skyrocket and impress all the Cool Kids, it will also open your eyes to a paradigm of programming which most programmers are completely unaware of, but which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the programming systems of the future. More importantly, though, this book is great fun to read and will make you a better programmer.

—Michael Vanier, Caltech