[racket] Racket v5.0

From: Eli Barzilay (eli at barzilay.org)
Date: Mon Jun 7 14:13:23 EDT 2010

PLT is happy to announce the release of Racket, available from

  http://racket-lang.org/

With Racket, you can script command shells and web servers; you can
quickly prototype animations and complex GUIs; regexps and threads
are here to serve you.  To organize your systems, you can mix and
match classes, modules or components.  Best of all, you start
without writing down types.  If you later wish to turn your script
into a program, equip your Racket modules with explicit type
declarations as you wish.  And Racket doesn't just come as a typed
variant; you can also write your modules in a purely functional and
lazy dialect.

Racket comes in so many flavors because Racket is much more than a
standard scripting language or a plain programming language.  Racket
supports language extensibility to an unequaled degree.  A Racket
programmer knows that making up a new language is as easy as writing
a new library.

To help you start quickly, Racket includes batteries in all shapes
and sizes, most importantly, extensive documentation and all kinds
of libraries.

Racket occupies a unique position between research and practice.  It
inherits many major ideas from language research, among them type
safety (when the type system says that x is a number, then at
runtime it always is a number) and memory safety (when some memory
is reclaimed by the garbage collector it is impossible to still have
a reference to it).  At the same time, user demand governs rigid
adherence to purely theoretical principles.

Racket, formerly PLT Scheme, is a product of over 15 years of
development.  Although Racket starts with a mature software base and an
established user community, its new name reflects our view that this is
just the beginning of Racket's evolution.

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!


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