SICP super-condensed -- this was my intro to Abelson & Sussman when it came out. So I ordered their book, which took a month to arrive, quite a valuable month, because I spent some of it trying to develop the ideas compressed into this article, for myself. You're better placed to absorb and appreciate an idea like lazy lists after an independent crack at the same problems.
If you like what you read, make sure to read "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs," by the authors of this paper. You can even get video lectures online! [1]
The PDF contains images from a scan done in the mid-90's. Elements on some pages are rather "smudged" -- particularly on the example figures (code and diagrams) that are appended.
I looked a bit but did not find a clearer copy. Would anyone happen to have one? (I.e. one that does not derive from this particular scan done by MIT.)
P.S. There is also a Postscript version available, but it is from the same scan and has the same deficiencies.
Volume 12 of Byte is 1987. Number 10 of that volume is September. Publishing dates typically lead calendar dates by up to a month or more.
Unfortunately, the next issue available, per the archive listing sorted by date, is 12:13, which identifies itself as November. (Perhaps one of their special issues came out in the intervening timeframe, in addition to October.)
I don't see it listed in the table of contents for September nor October. I'm about out of time, at the moment, but I might return to this, or maybe someone else will look at the next few months.
OK, I searched a little more, it's said to be Feb. '88, which seems to be missing, alas. I'd gotten the impression it was a nearly complete collection.
I used to do the same in school lessons. I can still remember the fixed point: 0.739085133, to the precision of the calculator I was using at the time. (Provided you're using radians. Which you should be.)
Fun fact about fixed points #1: Put a sheet of paper on a desk. Notice the precise area of the desk's surface that it covers. Now ball up the sheet of paper however you wish, without tearing it. Put it down again in such a way that every part of that sheet is somewhere over the original area that the paper occupied. Then there is at least one point on the paper that is precisely above its original location.
Fun fact about fixed points #2: Some functions, even simple ones suitable for a desktop calculator, do not reliably approach a fixed point when applied repeatedly to their own output. You can see this in action at Wikipedia "Cobweb plot" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobweb_plot) for the function known as the "logistic map", y = rx(1-x). Varying the initial value of x (really, x-subscript-zero) and the parameter r can cause the map to converge to a fixed point, to enter a repeating sequence of any length, or to remain in a finite range without ever repeating. This last behavior is known as "chaos".
