Lisp Breaks My Brain-Meats

I started reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs over the weekend. I’ve only got as far as the first set of examples and already my head hurts.

Write a procedure that takes three arguments and returns the sum of the squares of the larger two numbers. Without iteration because they haven’t shown you how to do loops in Scheme at this point in the text.

I’ts both wonderful and depressing that by the end of page 2 I’ve already hit a gaping chasm in my programming skills. I will prevail.

Incidentally, this is not a request for people to post the solution. Anyone doing so will suffer the wrath of my patented ‘slap-in-the-face-over-XML-RPC’ system.