Open course ware

[MUSIC-- "JESU, JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING" BY JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH] PROFESSOR: Well, there's one bit of mystery left, which I'd like to get rid of right now. And that's that we've been blithely doing things like cons assuming there's always another one. That we've been doing these things like car-ing and cdr-ing and assuming that we had some idea how this can be done. Now indeed we said that that's equivalent to having procedures. But that doesn't really solve the problem, because the procedure need all sorts of complicated mechanisms like environment structures and things like that to work. And those were ultimately made out of conses in the model that we had, so that really doesn't solve the problem. Now the problem here is the glue the data structure's made out of. What kind of possible thing could it be? We've been showing you things like a machine, a computer that has a controller, and some registers, and maybe a...

[MUSIC-- "JESU, JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING" BY JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH] PROFESSOR: Well, there's one bit of mystery left, which I'd like to get rid of right now. And that's that we've been blithely doing things like cons assuming there's always another one. That we've been doing these things like car-ing and cdr-ing and assuming that we had some idea how this can be done. Now indeed we said that that's equivalent to having procedures. But that doesn't really solve the problem, because the procedure need all sorts of complicated mechanisms like environment structures and things like that to work. And those were ultimately made out of conses in the model that we had, so that really doesn't solve the problem. Now the problem here is the glue the data structure's made out of. What kind of possible thing could it be? We've been showing you things like a machine, a computer that has a controller, and some registers, and maybe a...