Introduction

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Spark-Scheme is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. It is designed to solve real world programming problems, without sacrificing the fun of hacking. This tutorial will teach you how to use Spark effectively.

If you are skeptic about learning a new language, here are few points for you to consider:

• Spark is easy to learn. You can understand all of its syntactic rules in less than 5 minutes!
  

• Spark is powerful and expressive. It is a multi-paradigm language that supports Functional, Object Oriented (with concurrent actors and message passing) and a variety of other programming styles.
  

• Spark has an extensible syntax. You can mold Spark into a language specific to the problem domain and then write your program in that language.
  

• Spark has efficient data structures and feature rich code libraries. It has built-in support for multi-threading, GUI, databases and networking. It also has an innovative web programming framework.
  

• Spark integrates well with existing code. You need not write special interfacing code to reuse your existing C/C++ libraries in Spark.

To learn a new programming language you should read and write programs in it. To make the most out of this tutorial, read the sample programs and try to extend them by using your own ingenuity. You can type in and execute small code snippets at the Spark prompt (called the toplevel) itself, but it is useful to have a programmer's text editor handy to experiment with larger pieces of code. My favorite editor is Emacs, which is a nice companion for Lisp like languages.

Note: In the next three chapters, we cover the basics of the Scheme language. Then we move on to topics specific to Spark. For an in-depth study of Scheme, please follow one of the appropriate links on the Documentation page.