General Comments

Graham has an excellent Lisp coding style. His code is maintainable and portable. Function definitions are short and well-motivated, and, for the most part, variable and function names are clear and helpful. Exceptions are noted below.

However, there are a few areas where Graham's coding style should not be considered typical:

• Strong preference for if rather than cond, even when using if leads to nested if's or embedded progn's.
• Strong distaste for loop, because it is so complex and different from the functional programming style. Sometimes, however, loop is the clearest simplest way to write something.
• Preference for recursion over iteration, even if it might lead to code that causes stack overflows on very long lists.

Here are more detailed comments on particular chapters:

• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
  • A data-driven ray tracer
  • An object-oriented ray tracer
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Appendix A
• Appendix D

Comments? Send mail to Chris Riesbeck.