What interpreter to use while reading SICP? [closed]

Answer 1

In DrRacket IDE there is a SICP compatibility language. Using DrRacket helps format code, identify errors and it has a debugger. It also supports standard Scheme as well as it's own dialect, racket, which is very similar but has lots of libraries like most modern languages.

To install (after you have installed DrRacket)

From terminal run:

raco pkg install sicp

You get lots of output and perhaps some WARNINGS. Restart DrRacket and replace #lang racket with #lang sicp. To get the picture language add (#%require sicp-pict), thus this example should work nicely:

#lang sicp
(#%require sicp-pict)

(paint-hires  (below (beside diagonal-shading
                             (rotate90 diagonal-shading))
                     (beside (rotate270 diagonal-shading)
                             (rotate180 diagonal-shading))))

This is a short version of an answer to Which lang packet is proper for SICP in Dr.Racket?

Answer 2

MIT-scheme should work, depending on your OS, but it's not a terribly great interface. Racket is a very popular interpreter for Lisp-y things, and there does exist a package for Racket that tries to implement SICP scheme. It's not perfect, but it's what I've used in the past for SICP, and you'll be fighting much less with the interpreter than with MIT-scheme.