ezyang’s blog

the arc of software bends towards understanding

Scheme

Delaying implicit parameter binding

Today, we talk in more detail at some points about dynamic binding that Dan Doel brought up in the comments of Monday’s post. Our first step is to solidify our definition of dynamic binding as seen in a lazy language (Haskell, using the Reader monad) and in a strict language (Scheme, using a buggy meta-circular […]

  • July 28, 2010

Art. Code. Math. (And mit-scheme)

I was in rehearsal today, doodling away second oboe for Saint Saens' Organ Symphony for the nth time, and it occurred to me: I've listened to and played this piece of music enough times to know the full overall flow as well as a good chunk of the orchestral parts, not just mine. So when […]

  • April 30, 2010

Association maps in mit-scheme

I recently some did some benchmarking of persistent data structures in mit-scheme for my UROP. There were a few questions we were interested in: For what association sizes does a fancier data structure beat out your plain old association list? What is the price of persistence? That is, how many times slower are persistent data […]

  • April 21, 2010

Scheming environments

Environments are first-class objects in MIT/GNU Scheme. This is neat, because an integral part of the lexical structure of a Scheme is also a data-structure in its own right, able to encode data and behavior. In fact, the environment data structure is precisely what Yegge calls property lists, maps that can be linked up with […]

  • February 12, 2010