Thank you very much for this suggestion. I have been wanting to try functional programming for a long time, after seeing so many inscrutable and concise solutions on Project Euler. I never managed to get far with Haskell, though. In addition to the web version you linked to, Chris Krycho has created a nicely-formatted Kindle version. I am 4% through it and managed to write my first Scheme code for Exercise 1.3: "Define a procedure that takes three numbers as arguments and returns the sum of the squares of the two larger numbers." delta, how's your progress coming?
I am using a handy online interpreter. (define (square a) ( * a a))
(define (sumofsquares a b) (+ (square a) (square b)))
(define (<= a b) (or (< a b) (= a b)) )
(define (sosbig2 a b c)
(cond
( (and (<= a b) (<= a c)) (sumofsquares b c))
( (and (<= b a) (<= b c)) (sumofsquares a c))
( (and (<= c a) (<= c b)) (sumofsquares a b))))