Under consideration for publication in J. Functional Programming 1 Slideshow: Functional Presentations

Among slide-presentation systems, the dominant application offers essentially no abstraction capa-bility. Slideshow, an extension of PLT Scheme, represents our effort over the last several years to build an abstraction-friendly slide system. We show how functional programming is well suited to the task of slide creation, we report on the programming abstractions that we have developed for slides, and we describe our solutions to practical problems in rendering slides. We also describe ex-perimental extensions to DrScheme that support a mixture of programmatic and WYSIWYG slide creation. 1 Abstraction-Friendly Applications Strand a computer scientist at an airport, and the poor soul would probably survive for days with only a network-connected computer and five applications: an e-mail client, a web browser, a general-purpose text editor, a typesetting system, and a slide-presentation application. More specifically, while most any mail client or browser would satisfy the stranded scientist, probably only Emacs or vi would do for editing, LATEX for typesetting, and Microsoft PowerPointTM for preparing slides