[racket-dev] 5.2.0.1: displayln appears to write to console from where drracket was launched

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Robby Findler
<robby at eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 8:25 AM, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt <samth at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>> I've certainly wanted this in the past.  Ryan came up with some tricks that
>> made it easier, but I think a separate REPL that basically ran
>> (begin-for-syntax (print e)) would be a very nice addition.
>>
>> I'm also with Eli in thinking that this should be separate from online check
>> syntax, unless we make the whole repl use the results of online check
>> syntax.
>
> I don't understand your "unless".
>
> Just to be clear, I am imagining two different REPLs. One REPL you get
> when you click "Run". One REPL you get when you click some other
> button and the second REPL has the compile-time bindings of the
> program in the definitions window.

This sounds very nice, although I don't see why they need to be
separate.  We could just have a way to switch one repl back and forth
(as Eli just suggested), or two tabs in the interaction window, or
something else.  But I would think one click of Run should be
sufficient.  For programs that take a while to run, I'd be frustrated
having to do that multiple times.

> The second RPEL may or may not be "instantly available" depending on
> whether or not it is (internally) using the results of the online
> expansion.

I guess I don't see why online check syntax is even relevant here.
This seems like a case of premature optimization, and one with
semantic restrictions.  In addition to the issues discussed already,
there would be a bunch of things that a REPL hooked up to a separate
place couldn't do.  For example, syntax snips would be really
important at a syntax-time REPL, and they would be tricky if not
impossible in the architecture.  So would writing out code to a
separate file.

> Eli's argument boil down to saying that there are programs that don't
> work in online check syntax (and implicitly saying we should support
> those programs in this new REPL). If you agree with that, then what
> programs have you written that have this property?

I think here's it's important to draw a distinction between two kinds
of compile-time I/O.  One kind is done whenever a module is visited,
eg (begin-for-syntax (printf "foo")).  This isn't very well handled at
the moment in Racket, because how many times that happens is hard to
predict.  The other kind is I/O done in the course of a particular
transcription step, such as `include'.  That's quite well supported at
the moment by Racket, and something that we shouldn't break.

For examples of the second kind, here are a few I've written, used, or
wanted to use:
 - logging to a file during expansion
 - opening up a macro-debugger window during expansion
 - Dave Herman's or Jay's C compiler libraries
 - Felix Klock's FFI generation tools (for Larceny, but a really nice
idea that we could use) run the C compiler at expansion time
 - Invoking an external SAT solver for Typed Racket type checking

-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu