[plt-scheme] Comment re: Help Desk

From: Robby Findler (robby at cs.uchicago.edu)
Date: Thu Sep 13 16:33:29 EDT 2007

This is something we've had on the list for a while .... we'll get there!

Sorry,
Robby

On 9/13/07, Doug Williams <m.douglas.williams at gmail.com> wrote:
> It would be nice if the Help Desk offered to search PLaneT, also.  For
> example, a search for random would return several packages there.
>
> Doug
>
> On 9/13/07, Matt Jadud <jadudm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have more than one today, and I'm taking care of a bunch of email.
> >
> > A colleague across the land-sea of the USA was working on writing some
> > code in DrScheme. They gravitated towards R5RS (believing this was the
> > way to go), and threw their hands up at the absence of reasonable
> > things, like a random number generator, or the ability to grab the
> > current date in seconds, etc.
> >
> > Now, they haven't worked with PLT Scheme a lot, but spent plenty of
> > time in the past with Chez. Thinking that R5RS is the right language
> > to choose was, I'm going to argue, reasonable.
> >
> > Their comment, after learning that language choice restricts help-desk
> > results, was that it might have been nice if there was a way for them
> > to know that there were other results under other languages. That is,
> > if they had known there were '78 results in MzScheme (Textual)' as
> > opposed to nothing found in R5RS (when they searched for 'random'),
> > they might have spent less time today gnashing teeth.
> >
> > It's food for thought. Certainly, that could prove to be confusing to
> > a student in Beginning Scheme who does a search, and discovers there
> > are several bazillion hits on the term 'structure' if they switch to
> > "Pretty Big" instead of "Beginner Scheme." But I thought I would offer
> > it up all the same.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Matt
> > _________________________________________________
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> >
>
>
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