Re: Inconsistencies

[Rob Browning]

Gary Benson <address@hidden> writes:

> This is often the hardest thing to discover when learning a new
> language. The books and tutorials tell you how to write programs but
> only looking at other people's code do you discover how _people_
> write programs.

One other scheme book that you may already have seen, and I highly
recommend is "The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"
(commonly referred to as SICP).  It's a textbook style book, so that
might or might not suit your tastes, but it's deeply informative.

WRT to scheme conventions, some off the top of my head:

  - as mentioned lowercase is generally the rule

  - dashes are used as word separators in symbols: foo-bar not foo_bar.

(both of these rules follow the laziness principle if nothing else,
they're easier to type, and no, I haven't gotten around to remapping
my keyboard to put the parens where the brackets are :>)

also note from r5rs:

  Naming conventions
  ------------------

  By convention, the names of procedures that always return a boolean
  value usually end in "`?'".  Such procedures are called predicates.

  By convention, the names of procedures that store values into
  previously allocated locations (see section *note Storage model::)
  usually end in "`!'".  Such procedures are called mutation
  procedures.  By convention, the value returned by a mutation
  procedure is unspecified.

  By convention, "`->'" appears within the names of procedures that
  take an object of one type and return an analogous object of another
  type.  For example, `list->vector' takes a list and returns a vector
  whose elements are the same as those of the list.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930