Course Notes

For the winter 2025 term we are piloting new course notes. Older course material may appear similar but many details are different this term. If in doubt, ask us.

	Slides	Description
L00	Welcome	Overview of the course, tools, assignments and grading.
L01	Values and expressions	Prefix notation, exact numbers, Boolean expressions, constants
L02	Functions	Function definitions, inexact numbers, substitution rules, comments
L03	Conditional expressions	Expressions with cond and else, symbols, testing, contracts
L04	Recursion	Recursion on a natural number, names, scope
L05	Lists	List values and expressions, composite data, data definitions
L06	Recursion on lists	Recursion on a list, consuming lists, predicates over lists
L07	Producing lists	Filtering lists, transforming list, ordered lists
L08	Big-O notation	Mathematical background, list abbreviations, measuring efficiency
L09	Efficiency	Linear, quadratic, and exponential functions
L10	Finalizing the rules	Indexing, recursion on two lists, accumulators
	Midterm review	Midterm format, additional examples
L11	Lists of lists	Polygons, tables, subsets
L12	Strings	Characters, string processing, dictionaries, association lists
L13	Binary trees	Trees as a data abstraction, paths, binary search trees
L14	No rules	Euclid, Fibonacci, Collatz, counting up, mutual recursion, merge sort
L15	General trees	Arbitrarily nested lists, expression trees, atoms, quote notation
L16	Local definitions	Heron's formula, benefits of local definitions, merge sort (again)
L17	First-class functions	Producing and consuming functions, functions in lists, contracts
L18	Lambda	Anonymous functions, substitution rules, stable sorting
L19	Functional abstraction	Abstract list functions, build-list, map, foldr, foldl
L21	Randomness	True randomness, generating pseudorandom numbers, simulation
	History	Difference engine, lambda calculus, LISP, COBOL, ChatGPT