Chapter 4: Procedures and Variable Bindings

Overview

A three-armed spiral.

Procedures and variable bindings are the fundamental building blocks of Scheme programs. This chapter describes the small set of syntactic form whose primary purpose is to create procedures and manipulate variable bindings. It begins with two most fundamental building blocks of Scheme programs: variable references and lambda expressions, and continues with descriptions of the basic local variable binding forms let and letrec, top-level and internal define, and set!.

Various other forms that bind or assign variables for which the binding or assignment is not the primary purpose (such as named let) are found in Chapter 5.