The Reasoned Schemer [Paperback]

William E. Byrd (Author), Daniel P. Friedman (Author), Oleg Kiselyov (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 14, 2005

The goal of The Reasoned Schemer is to help the functional programmer think logically and the logic programmer think functionally. The authors of The Reasoned Schemer believe that logic programming is a natural extension of functional programming, and they demonstrate this by extending the functional language Scheme with logical constructs -- thereby combining the benefits of both styles. The extension encapsulates most of the ideas in the logic programming language Prolog.The pedagogical method of The Reasoned Schemer is a series of questions and answers, which proceed with the characteristic humor that marked The Little Schemer and The Seasoned Schmer. Familiarity with a functional language or with the first eight chapters of The Little Schemer is assumed. Adding logic capabilities required the introduction of new forms. The authors' goal is to show to what extent writing logic programs is the same as writing functional programs using these forms. In this way, the reader of The Reasoned Schemer will come to understand how simple logic programming is and how easy it is to define functions that behave like relations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Contrary to popular belief, logic programming doesn't always mean programming in Prolog. In this groundbreaking book, Friedman and Kiselyov extend Scheme to form a completely new kind of logic programming system, one which is in many ways even more elegant than Prolog. Written in the same classic question-and-answer format as the authors' previous book The Little Schemer, The Reasoned Schemer covers goals, first-class relations, interleaved and non-interleaved backtracking, the relationship between relational and functional programming, and much more. Reading this book will not only cause your geek rating to skyrocket and impress all the Cool Kids, it will also open your eyes to a paradigm of programming which most programmers are completely unaware of, but which will undoubtedly play a significant role in the programming systems of the future. More importantly, though, this book is great fun to read and will make you a better programmer."-- Michael Vanier, Caltech

About the Author

William E. Byrd is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Indiana University.

Oleg Kiselyov is a computer scientist from Monterey, California.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (October 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262562146
• ISBN-13: 978-0262562140
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #214,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mind-Blowing Book, October 22, 2005

By 

Conrad Barski "Dr. Code" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Reasoned Schemer (Paperback)

I'm a long-time fan of the "Schemer" series of books and was excited to receive my preordered copy of "The Reasoned Schemer" yesterday- It was supposed to be published in July but must have been held up until now...

I have no relationship with any of the authors and just want to put my $0.02 in on it, since not many others may have a copy yet- I think it is absolutely FANTASTIC so far!

The book itself is very much in the same style as the rest of the "Schemers"- A Q&A style of exposition that helps your brain to absorb most of the essence of a new programming style without having to spend the time to write tons of actual code yourself to learn the basic philosophy.

The main purpose of the book is to attach a set of logic programming commands to the core R5RS scheme that allow you to implement all kinds of cool things, such as constraint programming, pattern matching, nondeterministic programming, and PROLOG-like logical reasoning. The material covered is not too dissimilar from the material in the back of "On Lisp" or some parts of SICP. What distinguishes it is that the implementation used has been widdled down to its bare essence and uses a syntax modeled on standard FP scheme syntax. Plus, the subject matter is treated with a certain academic rigor that gives these new commands the feeling of a practical toolset instead of just a clever novelty. I could imagine incorporating these commands into my regular scheme code...

As I mentioned, there is a list of new mysterious scheme commands that enable the logic reasoning abilities- They look superficially like the standard FP commands in scheme, but behave slightly different- They have names such as "conde", "caro", etc. There are also a couple of commands with no FP scheme analogue, such as "run" and "fresh". Using these new commands, logical reasoning can be mixed with standard FP scheme pretty seamlessly. An appendix at the end of the book implements the full set of commands- It totals about 150 LOC in length.

I'm still only partially into the book, but just wanted to let folks know that this book has some really mind-blowing ideas and may be the answer to those, like me, who are still searching for a resource that will allow them to "get" PROLOG-like languages and want to learn how to incorporate such techniques into their programming projects with the least amount of fuss possible.
[...]

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating and challenging, February 4, 2007

By 

Michael Vanier (Pasadena, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Reasoned Schemer (Paperback)

As the saying goes, if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like. The authors have extended the approach of their classic book _The Little Schemer_ to encompass what is usually called logic programming, but which they refer to as "relational programming" (a much better name, in my opinion). They extend the Scheme language with relational analogues of many constructs, notably lambda and cond (in many, many variations), and also provide extended versions of standard Scheme operations like cons, car, and cdr. Basically, the relational approach involves taking the result of a function call and making it just another argument, but a special argument that can get assigned to as the result of the computation. Big deal, so what? you ask. The important thing is that _all_ of the function arguments behave this way, so that you can specify the result of a function (relation) and ask the system to generate the arguments. For instance, instead of saying 2 + 2 = X and figuring out what X is, you can say X + 2 = 4 and the system will figure out what X has to be (in this case... ummm... oh yeah, 2). To do this, the system uses a mechanism called "backtracking" which systematically tries alternatives until it either finds the answer, gives up, or (if you didn't program the search right) goes on forever. If you haven't seen this style of programming before, this book will definitely open your eyes.

The relational/logic programming style is usually learned by studying the Prolog language, which is how I learned it (though I'm no expert). Having a knowledge of Prolog will definitely make this book easier to understand, although the approach given here is more modern than Prolog in several ways. For one thing, the named relations of Prolog are replaced here by anonymous relations (analogous to lambda expressions being anonymous functions), and for another, the (somewhat brutal) "cut" operator of Prolog, which is used to control backtracking, is ignored in favor of more subtle approaches involving interleaving solutions and giving up after single results are found.

I think the approach of learning-by-pattern-recognition that all the "Little X" books use is fairly effective here, though I think a lot of readers (meaning me) wouldn't mind a more extended discussion of the mechanics of the system.

All in all, if you liked _The Little Schemer_ and are curious about new ways of programming, you should definitely pick up a copy of this book. It will stretch your mind like a Slinky, and when you're done you'll have learned a new way of looking at programming.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars DO NOT purchase this in electronic form!, May 4, 2011

By 

Brian - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Reasoned Schemer (Kindle Edition)

So. I read the Little Lisper a couple of years ago and enjoyed it. I finally got around to buying this book last night for my new Kindle. BIG mistake. It is unreadable. The font size can only be changed for the preface, acknowledgements and contents overview. The actual meat of the book CANNOT be altered with any settings on the Kindle. It's not a PDF so I can't zoom and the font is soooo small (about a millimeter high) it is unreadable even with 20/15 vision!

I wish I could actually comment on the book itself...

Buy the dead tree version.