[plt-scheme] Re: [plt-edu] Leads on Liberal Arts Education and Programming

Aha! But I can not ask people to go read Godel.

I need something, besides my own words, that point to the idea that
writing a Scheme program, formatting a text document, and writing
music are all programming exercises:

-- Scheme programs are data interpreted by something called an
interpreter or are programs that tell interpreter what to do

-- writing a musical score is recording data (musical notes in
sequence) or a program that tells an musical interpreter what to do
(whether a it is a synthesizer or a musician)

-- one enters characters and figures in a Word processor or a program
that tells an text-formatting interpreter what to do

It is a broader definition than the classical view that programming
requires a computer programming language. Some people at SHU are
intrigued by this, but I am short on references. :-( I am not about to
show them that lists can be implemented as functions or as a data
structure. I would just loose them.

Marco

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
> Matthias and I pushed for that vision.  I don't think either of us for
> a moment believed it had anything to do with programs being data.
>
> By the way, programs are data in virtually all languages.  E.g.,
>
>  "void main () {return 0;}"
>
> is a perfectly valid string in C.  At a less mundane level, this is
> the heart of Godel's insight.
>
> Shriram
>