[racket] Changing the pretty print columns when running raco expand

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Thu Nov 7 12:13:58 EST 2013

"raco expand"?  If you've not yet tried the Macro Stepper feature of 
DrRacket, you are in for a treat.

Racket's theoretical foundation for phases, Racket's syntax objects, 
"syntax-parse", DrRacket's Macro Stepper, and DrRacket's online Check 
Syntax (on-the-fly error highlighting when people are using the macros, 
especially good if you used "syntax-parse")... these are some of the 
reasons that Racket slaughters at mini-languages and DSLs.  I suggest 
that people look at any of these that they have not already.

BTW, one of the tricks to using the Macro Stepper quickly: put your 
example use of the macro in its own module temporarily, with as little 
other stuff as possible.  Fewer clicks of the stepper button to expand 
what you're interested in.

Neil V.

Eric Dobson wrote at 11/07/2013 11:39 AM:
> I use raco expand a bunch when debugging macros to see the final
> output and see why it doesn't match up with my expectations. One issue
> I have is that the pretty printer decides to only use 80ish columns
> when my terminal is 200 wide, this makes the output really ugly and
> hard to read. If this was a racket command I could use -e
> "(pretty-print-colums 200)", but I don't see a way to do that with
> raco. Is there an easy way to set up printing parameters before the
> expansion code is run?


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