CDA-9312614 PROJECT SUMMARY

INSTITUTION: Indiana University, Bloomington

TITLE OF PROJECT: Tools and Techniques for Use of the Scheme Programming
Language in Undergraduate Education

LIST OF PIs: Christopher T. Haynes, R. Kent Dybvig, Daniel P. Friedman,
LoriLee Sadler, George Springer


SUMMARY OF COMPLETED PROJECT

The exceptional simplicity and power of the Scheme programming language
that account for its widespread use in computer science research also
explain its great potential in education.  The full potential of Scheme has
not been realized due to the lack of a quality programming environment with
a graphic user interface, limited pedagogic materials, and limited
awareness of Scheme's pedagogic potential.  The goal of this project was to
make such software and pedagogic materials widely available.

This project supported development of a Scheme Widget Library, SWL, to be
released soon with support for several popular computing environments. SWL
provides a superior object-oriented Scheme programming environment,
including a structure editor, graphical inspector, debugger, and profiler.
Extensive materials have been developed and published on the Web for
several Scheme-based courses, including introduction to programming,
programming languages, and compilers.  Several workshops were offered at
Indiana University and a major conference to train teachers in use of the
new materials, and several papers were published to widely disseminate our
findings.  A Web-based repository of Scheme-related materials of all sorts
was constructed.

Overall this project has enhanced opportunities for the introduction of
research results in undergraduate education using the Scheme
programming language. 


TECHNICAL INFORMATION
 
SOFTWARE

Indiana University Computer Science Department Programming Languages
Group.  "The Scheme Widget Library (SWL)," a multithreaded graphics
and windowing library for Scheme and a set of tools developed using
this library.  Version 0.9 is now in beta-test; Version 1.0 will be
released in early 1998 via the project web cited below.

INTERNET PUBLICATIONS 

www.cs.indiana.edu/eip: This document contains link to a variety of
educational materials developed as part of this project.  Included is
extensive support for three courses: programming languages, compilers,
and introduction to computing.

www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository: A repository of materials related to
the Scheme programming language, including a wide variety of Internet
resources.

TRADITIONAL PUBLICATIONS

Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, The Little MLer.  MIT Press,
1997.

Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, A Little Java, A Few Patterns.
MIT Press, 1997.

Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, The Seasoned Schemer. MIT Press,
1996.

Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen, The Little Schemer, Fourth
Edition. MIT Press, 1996.

R. Kent Dybvig, The Scheme Programming Language, Second Edition.
Prentice-Hall, 1996.

Oscar Waddell and R. Kent Dybvig, "Fast and effective procedure
inlining." In Proceedings of the Fourth International Static Analysis
Symposium, September 1997 (to appear).

Christopher T. Haynes, "Compiling: a high-level introduction using
Scheme." In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eigth SIGCSE Technical
Symposium on Computer Science Education. (February, 1996).

Eric Hilsdale, J. Michael Ashley, R. Kent Dybvig and Daniel P. Friedman,
"Compiler construction using Scheme."  In the proceedings of the
Functional programming languages in education conference (December, 1995),
LNCS 10:22, P. H. Hartel and M. J. Plasmeijer, eds., Springer-Verlag, 
pp. 251-268.

Carl Bruggeman, Oscar Waddell, and R. Kent Dybvig, "Representing control in
the presence of one-shot continuations."  Proceedings of the Conference on
Programming Language Design and Implementation, 1996, pp. 99-107.

Hsianlin Dzeng and Christopher T. Haynes. "Type reconstruction for
variable-arity procedures." In Proceedings of the 1994 ACM Conference
on LISP and Functional Programming. (June, 1994), 239--249.