Robert Schmaus <address@hidden> writes:
Thanks Aaron,
it's rather on-topic I guess. Or rather: I'm afraid.
In your first link, there's a sample chapter of "The Little Schemer"
available. You'd think that they would put something up that's
acutally helpful at getting the idea of Scheme and/or that book. And
maybe that even was their intention! But ... can you make any sense of
this?
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/sample.pdf
I certainly can't.
That doesn't make a statement about Scheme, just like dadaism does not
make a statement about mathematical logic.
I guess my problem is: Scheme seems to be a very nice intellectual
exercise. I'm sure it's very elegant and - ultimately - very powerful
(as I can see in the snippet repository)
That's not really related. Scheme is more a way of expressing things
than a way of doing things: the actual work (which would be described as
"powerful") is the business of the application-specific primitives.
Powerful snippets just mean that extensive functionality has been made
accessible via Scheme. Scheme brings comparatively little baggage of
its own (well, concerning early iterations of the language) so it ties
reasonably nicely into larger systems.
Ok, thanks again for the references. I think for now, I simply stay
within the "out of the box" Lilypond limits. I'd have to invest hours
of learning Scheme - that's not an option for the near future, I'm
afraid.
It's usually a distributed investment. You get some things done, then
some more things. Scheme is not as far away in LilyPond as, say, Lua is
in LuaTeX. It's much more integrated so it doesn't take a leap into a
distant world.