[neilv]

> The pdf starts out with a curious little 'texinfo foreword'. Being able to type `info sicp` in one's shell?

Yes, mostly in Emacs, but you could also do it in your shell. :) https://www.neilvandyke.org/sicp-texi/

The Texinfo format happened a couple years ago, in the early days of the Web, and let people on modest computers who couldn't run a Web browser work through SICP on their screens (no need for expense of printing to paper) while they also ran a Scheme interpreter on the same modest computer. The work was done by Lytha Ayth from the original freely-available HTML version of the book.

Later on, and now that everyone has more powerful computers, I've heard someone took the Texinfo source code, and replaced the ASCII-art illustrations with real ones, and ran it through TeX, such as for printing or PDF of "camera ready" format that looked similar to the original print book from MIT Press.

I wasn't involved in that much more recent TeX work, and though it was kind of them to preserve the version number with my name in it, I'll ask them to please remove it. (The name was part of some kind of distributed version-tracking scheme that Lytha Ayth proposed, when this seemed to be in the spirit of the original HTML release of the book. I tried to follow versioning instructions when I made changes to the Texinfo source, not knowing my name would show up 20 years later in a very different thing. :)

[hf]

[Late reply -- forgot to hit the button. ;]

Thank you for the pointer and, more so, your contributions.

That screenshot of SICP in Emacs -- running side-by-side with the built-in Guile interpreter -- induces peculiar sensations. An echo of how things could've been and possibly still are in some obscure(d) corners of the Net. An interactive learning environment that at least points in the right direction. It certainly looks elegant and somewhat inspirational to me (though my inner Alan Kay is voicing some profound objections ;).

In any case: you carried that torch for a while, don't be hesitant accepting apparently undue credit -- there's too little, in any case, to warrant worry. ;)

[neilv]

Thank you for your nice note.

Regarding the Emacs screenshot, here's another, from an early attempt to make Emacs more off-she-shelf usable for Scheme programming: https://www.neilvandyke.org/quack/

An actually better experience in Emacs (and part of what got me psyched to learn Lisps) is for Emacs Lisp programming: with a properly configured/installed Emacs, you can be browsing the documentation with rapid navigation, bringing up hypertext docstrings from your code , with links to the source code (perhaps the source code of Emacs itself), evaluating code that affects your running environment from both REPL and editor, etc. It's different than the Smalltalk-80 environment (which I also used, and wrote a little Smalltalk browser for), but there is some overlap. Modern IDEs let you do some of that, and some other things, but sometimes not as well, and Emacs people had this for a few decades.