There's a REALLY cool chapter in the first edition, Chapter 12 ("Compiler Derivation") about using continuation-passing style to incrementally convert an interpreter to a (bytecode) compiler. I had never seen that approach before, and it completely blew my mind. Steele's _RABBIT_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AITR...), Krantz's _ORBIT_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf), and Appel's _Compiling with Continuations_ develop the approach further.
It was cut from later editions, for some reason. Too advanced? Too tangential to the rest of the book? Too bad.
Comments
OTOH, I read SICP first, and later checked out HTDP. It didn't seem very interesting to me. Not sure what I would have thought about it first.
Other potential prerequisites to SICP, all of which use Scheme: The Little Schemer (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTLS/; a quick read, but a bit overly cute), EoPL (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/eip/eopl.html; a great book in its own right; I recommend the _first_ edition), PLAI (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/).
I'd also add The Schemer's Guide to that list: http://www.schemers.com/tsg.html
Good story about it here: http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html
EoPL seems like an interesting read. But why is the 1st edition better?
There's a REALLY cool chapter in the first edition, Chapter 12 ("Compiler Derivation") about using continuation-passing style to incrementally convert an interpreter to a (bytecode) compiler. I had never seen that approach before, and it completely blew my mind. Steele's _RABBIT_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AITR...), Krantz's _ORBIT_ (http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/orbit-thesis.pdf), and Appel's _Compiling with Continuations_ develop the approach further.
It was cut from later editions, for some reason. Too advanced? Too tangential to the rest of the book? Too bad.
The first edition is also really cheap. FWIW.