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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