| > The five chapters of SICP (I recommend http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/index.xhtml) are: > - 1 Building Abstractions with Procedures Where Abelson, Sussman & Sussman use the word "procedures" here, they mean what we would typically call "functions" today. Today, "procedural programming" basically means "imperative programming", and that is not the idiom they are teaching. (Where the exact term "procedure" is used nowadays — though it's less common now — it generally refers specifically to a function which does not return a usable value, which is called specifically for its side effects. SICP instead generally describes what we would now call "functional programming".) > That is, you were explicitly asserting that the core material of SICP was concerned with "structure", "architecture", and "functions" in the sense of the core material of those courses By "SICP" I clearly meant 6.001 and only 6.001, since that's the course titled as such ("SICP" stands for "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs"). I was not asserting that SICP was concerned with any term in the sense of the core material of any other course, which is why I didn't mention the other courses in that sentence. I was asserting that SICP was concerned with those concepts as they are commonly understood. I wrote the comment knowing nothing of the content of the other courses, because nothing about the content of the other courses was relevant to the point I was making. Please do not try to tell me what I meant by my own words. |