Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Abelson, H., Sussman, G. J., & Sussman, J. (1996). Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. MIT Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1996

Link

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262510875/structure-and-interpretation-of-computer-programs/

Cited from

biology_ecology, computer_science, human_computer_interaction, linguistics_semiotics, logistics_supply_chain

Cited by

10 citations across 10 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Context
  • In computing and programming languages, lexical and dynamic scope and namespace resolution make the same identifier resolve to different bindings under different contexts

    This sourceTreats environment-based name resolution, contrasting lexical scope (binding fixed by surrounding program text) with dynamic scope (binding fixed by the runtime call stack) as context for identifier binding.

• Higher Order Function
  • In programming it is map, filter, reduce, decorators, callbacks, middleware, dependency injection, currying, and monads.

    This sourceCanonical treatment of higher-order procedures — functions as arguments and return values (map, fold, function factories) — and the view of mathematical operators as the same move.

• Located-In Relation
  • The locatum is the variable; the location is the scope (a function or block); the inclusion region is the lexical extent, with the inclusion test decided by scope rules; and the relation-time is the variable's lifetime

    This sourceTreats lexical scoping and closure capture of variables in an environment, the variable's lifetime within its scope.

• Meta-Symbolic Reflection
  • Programming languages: Lisp's homoiconicity (code is data) enables macros, eval, and reflection APIs; Abelson & Sussman 1985
• Portable Context Bundle
  • A programmer reasoning about a lexical closure, a lawyer reasoning about stare decisis, an ML engineer reasoning about distribution shift, and an operations engineer reasoning about a frozen container image are reasoning about the same structure: a behaviour-unit that carries its definition-time environment across a context boundary, with a binding rule that determines whether free references resolve against captured or ambient context.

    This sourceTreats lexical scoping and the environment model in which a procedure captures and resolves free variables against its definition-time environment.

• Postponement
  • Software. Late binding, lazy evaluation, parametric types, configuration deferred to deploy or first run rather than compile time, and feature flags that decouple release from build.

    This sourceTreats delayed (lazy) evaluation, streams, and late binding as deferring commitment until a value is demanded.

• Progressive Disclosure
  • The well-chosen defaults are the canonical first examples — countdown, factorial — chosen because a typical learner at that depth is well served by them.

    This sourceUses factorial and counting-down recursions as the canonical first examples for teaching recursive process (Section 1.2).

• Recursion
  • The base-case versus recursive-case dichotomy

    This sourceAbelson-Sussman Structure Interpretation Computer Programs metalinguistic abstraction DSL.

Domain-specific

• Anonymous Function
  • SICP uses procedures as arguments and lambda expressions to make such higher-order combinations explicit.

Mechanisms

• Lazy Sequence Generator
  • The discipline is to bound infinite sources at the consumer

    This sourceDemonstrates lazy infinite streams that compute only the finite portion a consumer accesses.

Verification

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://web.mit.edu/6.001/6.037/sicp.pdf ×1

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