Studying SICP with emacs

April 20, 2026

Credits #

Thanks to this post by Konstantinos Chousos which already covered all of this information.

Introduction #

SICP, or the Structure and Interpretation of Compupter Programs, also known as the Wizard book, is a famous Computer Science book. It was used for the intro to CompSci course at MIT for many years, and I quite enjoyed it. Here’s a nice way to enjoy it on emacs.

Installation #

`Racket` VS `MIT Scheme` #

Using your package manager of choice, install racket. It carries with it a bunch of schemes and LISPs. My first time through the book, I used MIT Scheme, but it’s not quite the same. This version is closer to the one they made for the book.

If you want to install racket without a package manager, you can also do that with their install script, easy to find on their website.

Getting to work with the correct scheme #

You can either follow the following instructions (found here):

Use DrRacket to install the sicp package like this:

  1. Open the Package Manager: in DrRacket choose the menu "File" then choose "Package Manager...".

  2. In the tab "Do What I Mean" find the text field and enter: sicp

  3. Finally click the "Install" button.

  4. Test it. Make sure DrRacket has "Determine language from source" in the bottom left corner. Write the following program and click run:

        #lang sicp
        (inc 42)

  The expected output is 43.

Or alternatively use the following command line function: raco pkg install sicp.

Then you can just use #lang sicp at the top of all your scripts!

Setting up emacs #

There are two packages that can be useful. The first one is sicp and the second one is racket-mode:

(use-package sicp
  :ensure t)

(use-package racket-mode
  :ensure t)

The first package allows you to access sicp in texinfo format, so you can type C-h i and find SICP there to go through. The second is a bunch of utilities.

Then, make a .rkt file, start it with #lang sicp and run it with M-x racket-run. The magic happens now: once the REPL is running with M-x racket-run, you can run any expression into the REPL by using C-x C-e like you would any elisp!