3 Hello Scheme!

In this chapter, we introduce the basic concepts that underpin the elegance and power of the Scheme language.

Readers who already possess a background knowledge of Scheme may happily skip this chapter. For the reader who is new to the language, however, the following discussions on data, procedures, expressions and closure are designed to provide a minimum level of Scheme understanding that is more or less assumed by the chapters that follow.

The style of this introductory material aims about halfway between the terse precision of R5RS and the discursiveness of existing Scheme tutorials. For pointers to useful Scheme resources on the web, please see Further Reading.