Re: A new Scheme tutorial (Jean Abou Samra)

[Jean Abou Samra]

> Ouch! I see what you mean. And this is meant to be simplified? But the 
> problem really is that if a user tries to use an identifier with an 
> illegal syntax, how do they know? This is rather like those really 
> annoying websites which ask you to choose a password, and then tell 
> you that it's illegal without telling you why.


Simple: don't use too weird identifiers :-)

I'll try to rephrase that part again. The point of mentioning this is
to explain that '+', '-', '*', '/' are just procedures, not special
syntax, and to address the question that I imagine this immediately raises
in the mind of a reader used to more mainstream programming languages:
"what, a procedure called '+', is that really valid"? There are also
two conventions that are useful to know:

- question mark at the end of a predicate (explained later in
  the tutorial),
- exclamation mark at the end of a side-effecting procedure
  (I'm not showing any of these in this basic tutorial, so
  I didn't explain it).

It's not really encouraged to get creative about special characters in
your variable names. Just stick with the conventions.

Cheers,
Jean