I feel like SICP would be a perfect text for introductory CS, if there were a "pre-CS" course in high schools
That is more or less what this was meant to be:
That is more or less what this was meant to be:
Honestly, I think it is a superior intro-book for genuine beginners, compared to SICP, and a quick perusal of the two will allow most people to come to a conclusion not only about the level at which they are pitched, but which one is pedagogically superior for them in terms of both structure and writing.
Are they? I don't know if I remember hearing anyone complain about those before.
In TXR Lisp, which is quite CL-like in some places and deliberately so, I used the names succ, ssucc, and sssucc for adding 1, 2, 3, and 4. The inverses are pred, ppred, and pppred.
These are vaguely inspired by Hofstader's S0, SS0, SSS0 ... in Gödel, Escher, Bach as well a by caar, cddr, ... plus the dim memory of operators called succ and pred in Pascal).