SICP 2.3.3

This week: Representing sets!

Conversational notes

• 2.3.3 (Pg 205): "simplifying (reducing) the ex- pressions at either construction time or selection time"
• 2.3.3 (Pg 205): do we want a way to generate a list of set elements?

weekly recap message

Hey folks!

We had a festive celebration this past Friday to commemorate our last meeting in 2013, the holiday season, and the departure of a core committer to CSCabal as Yomna head back to school. There were cookies, fudge, warm beverages and sweaters -- a delightful sendoff to an eventful year.

In between mouthfuls of tasty treats we discussed the complexity class of operations on different set representations, tree balancing, the availability of data structures and parallel algorithms in the C standard library, optimizations over pure (and mostly pure) functions and use cases for macros, monads and multisets.

We'll meet again on January 10 having read chapter 2.3.4 on Huffman trees. The last couple months have paved a very auspicious beginning -- I doubt any secret society anywhere has ever had such a productive first quarter. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what we accomplish in 2014.

Happy coding, and Happy Holidays!

Dec 15