I like Python, but how do they plan on teaching recursion with a language that doesn't optimize tail recursion?
Oh, I see, just give them trivially small data sets: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab8/lab8...
Oh, I see, just give them trivially small data sets: http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/sp12/labs/lab8/lab8...
The question I had is how are they going to code a metacircular interpreter? Apparently they make a Scheme interpreter instead.
Just one possibility: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/474088/
Focus is naturally put on how a language looks on paper, more than how it executes on the machine.
My 2c.
Also, it's the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs; naturally, the first bit talks about how programs look (structure), but the second bit (mainly chapters 4 and 5, if I remember correctly) talks about exactly that: how to execute code on the machine. The last chapter, in fact, introduces a register-based language not unlike assembly.