[plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme

From: Jos Koot (jos.koot at telefonica.net)
Date: Sat Jul 5 12:35:06 EDT 2008

You said "The entire system has problems" That's true. Even after a 
succesfull stop and leaving DrScheme, my system may continue thrashing for 
some time. It may very well be a Windows problem rather than a PLT problem. 
I don't know.
Jos

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robby Findler" <robby at cs.uchicago.edu>
To: "Jos Koot" <jos.koot at telefonica.net>
Cc: "Matthias Felleisen" <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>; "budu" 
<nbuduroi at gmail.com>; <plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu>
Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2008 6:16 PM
Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme


> Yes, I've had that experience too. I find that the keyboard is a
> little bit more reliable, but in general when thrashing is going on,
> the entire system has problems.
>
> Do you find that this is happening when you're using the memory limits?
>
> Robby
>
> On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 11:12 AM, Jos Koot <jos.koot at telefonica.net> wrote:
>> As you probably know, I am addicted to PLT Scheme, its IDE included.
>> I hate typing shell commands. With PLT's IDE I can avoid those commands..
>> Allow me to mention, though, that the stop button does not easily 
>> (sometimes
>> not at all) repond when the garbage collector is thrashing.
>> This is no problem for me, but may be you want to know.
>> (This pertains to Windows XP Home and to all versions of DrScheme I ever
>> downloaded and to pretty-big, #lang scheme, #!r6rs and more.)
>> Jos
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Matthias Felleisen"
>> <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>
>> To: "budu" <nbuduroi at gmail.com>
>> Cc: <plt-scheme at list.cs.brown.edu>
>> Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2008 3:19 PM
>> Subject: Re: [plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Well, unlike all other "pedagogic" IDEs, DrScheme has a reliable STOP
>>> button for infinite loops. (It's possible that others have caught up, 
>>> but I
>>> am sure we were first.)
>>>
>>> Furthermore, you can and should set the memory limit for REPLs so  that
>>> the memory limit for the REPL thread is distinct from the memory  limit 
>>> for
>>> the whole system and doesn't take it down. You need to  teach both ideas 
>>> to
>>> beginners eventually: computations consume space,  and infinite 
>>> computations
>>> consume unbounded space, plus you as a  programmer should learn to set 
>>> the
>>> limits in your context.
>>>
>>> Thanks for the feedback -- Matthias
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Jul 4, 2008, at 10:43 AM, budu wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi, I'm an occasional DrScheme user (normally I use Emacs) and there
>>>> is some little things I don't like about it. One is keyboard
>>>> shortcuts, which I never been able to change. I found out recently
>>>> about the "Enable keybindings in menus" options, it's great, but I'm
>>>> still missing some of my favorite shortcuts, mainly C-j for newline.
>>>> Maybe the answer lies into the Help Desk, but it totally confuse me,
>>>> it seems like I'm never able to find what I'm searching for.
>>>>
>>>> The bigger issue now is about DrScheme not being as solid as I'd like
>>>> it to be. Maybe I'm too much used to Emacs, because when I use its
>>>> REPL it never crash no matter what. I've lost some code (without any
>>>> importance) this morning because I did try to run a function that
>>>> generate an infinite loop and it crashed DrScheme with an out of
>>>> memory exception. When considering that this IDE is geared toward
>>>> beginners, I find it strange that it can't sustain even a mere
>>>> infinite loop. Maybe that's the price to pay for the great debugging
>>>> features DrSceme have.
>>>>
>>>> BTW, I'm a little late for this but congratulation to the PLT devs for
>>>> version 4, it's a really great release.
>>>>
>>>> _________________________________________________
>>>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>>
>>> _________________________________________________
>>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>
>> _________________________________________________
>>  For list-related administrative tasks:
>>  http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
>>
>> 



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