[racket] Quoted expressions in #lang racket

From: Danny Yoo (dyoo at cs.wpi.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 18 17:38:25 EDT 2011

> Such a cold community. :(
> I give up. I'm sorry for bothering you with my bad english and stupidity,
> I'll never post to this group again.

Hello!

Whoa!  I think you are reading a lot more aggression out of those
replies than what actually exists.  Your english is fine; no one has
made a single remark about it.  (Um, unless the previous sentence
counts...)


If it helps: the replies to this thread cover at least two or three
separate things.

    1.  They've shown you how to set up DrRacket so it prints things
the traditional Lisp way.  If you adjust it in the language preference
menu, values should print exactly as they would in a traditional Lisp.

Have you been able to get this to work, or is the language preference
menu not working for you?  Changing the default should be about two or
three mouse clicks, if I remember right.


    2.  Several people have given a justification for why the default
in Racket prints things in a way that's different from what you're
used to.  The difference is not accidental: it's there by design.  For
example, you can see Section 3.3 of
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffkf-drscheme-journal/paper.pdf,
as well as Section 2.1 of Wadler's "Why Calculating is Better than
Scheming" (http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/wadler87.pdf)

So there's been a lot of thought about this, and the default in Racket
skews toward making it easier for students to think about calculating.
 Admittedly, this means that Racket's default printing behavior is
deviating from traditional Lisps.  But changing the default to Lisp
style should be easy to do.  Is that sufficient for you, or do you
have a proposal?

    3.  There's a little bit of silliness on the thread because of the
situation: it's not clear from the email thread that you realize that
you're talking directly with several of the authors of DrRacket.  You
have got incredible access to them on this mailing list.



Best of wishes to you!


Posted on the users mailing list.