What's illegal about my function?

[flagrant2]

Hi everyone. I'm new to scheme and functional programming in general, so I apologize if this kind of question gets asked a lot. I've tried every conceivable search phrase and lots of modifications, consulted numerous books and tutorials, but the error message just isn't descriptive. I'm afraid I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the language or something.

I'm attempting to write a function that prints each entry of a list on its own line using by re-cursing on the tail. Here's what I have:

Code: Select all

(define print-list
  (lambda (l)
    (if (null? l)
        (display "done\n")
        (  (display (car l))  (newline)  (print-list (cdr l)) ))))

(print-list '(1 2 3 4 5) )

Here's how I'm running it and what I get:

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john@home:~/code/lisp$ tinyscheme helloworld.scm
1
2
3
4
5
done
Error: (helloworld.scm : 8) illegal function
Errors encountered reading helloworld.scm
john@home:~/code/lisp$

The thing runs as I expected, but then shows me the error message and exits. What have I done wrong?

Thanks very much in advance!

[Goheeca]

If you used another implementation of scheme things wouldn't happen so good. You are trying to use a block of code, but you can't just use surrounding parentheses:

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((expr1)
 (expr2)
 (expr3))

the first member of a list (expr1) is evaluated and used as an function, thus for a block of code there is an function begin:

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(begin (expr1)
       (expr2)
       (expr3))

Solution for your little problem is:

Code: Select all

(define print-list
  (lambda (l)
    (if (null? l)
      (display "done\n")
      (begin
        (display (car l))
        (newline)
        (print-list (cdr l))))))