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Realm of Racket
book

Realm of Racket

by Conrad Barski M.D., David Van Horn, Eight Students of Northeastern University, Matthias Felleisen
June 2013
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
312 pages
6h 47m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from Realm of Racket

Chapter 3. (Basics of Racket)

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You’ve written your first program. It consisted of a few functions that dealt with numbers. You’ve seen the basics of expressions and definitions. You know there are a lot of parentheses.

Now it’s time to bring some order to chaos. In this chapter, we’ll show you other kinds of data, as well as the general structure and meaning of Racket programs.

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3.1 Syntax and Semantics

To understand any language—be it a human language or a language for programming—requires two concepts from the field of linguistics. Computer scientists refer to them as “syntax” and “semantics.” You should know that these are just fancy words for “grammar” and “meaning.”

Here is a typical sentence in the English language:

My dog ate my homework. ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781457185120Errata