Section 10.2.6 Conditional Expressions

[nelmil]

Hi Duncan. This is Nelson from the mailing list. I'm going over the book and you talk about the "true atom" without giving a discussion on what an atom is. A search through the repo only talks about atoms in this section.

[oubiwann]

Hey Nelson! Sorry, I only saw these tickets today -- I've just added myself to the watch list on this repo so I'll be getting them in the future, now.

Thanks for the time about atoms. I'll add some text (probably a thorough footnote) to point folks in the right direction.

[oubiwann]

Okay, so I took a look at the text, and here's what I thought:

• of course, you are right -- it's not cool to just drop something like that in there without explanation
• SICP doesn't actually explain language syntax too much -- they tend to gloss over it
  • this seems like a reasonable thing to do, helping to limit scope for what is a rather extraordinary amount of work
  • it's also the sort of thing I imagine would be covered by TAs in a college course, or be required as part of prerequisite material
• as such, I decided to drop the reference to atoms there as well as the footnote I'd inserted about true and false -- this was out of character from SICP