[racket] Questions from a new user

From: Matthias Felleisen (matthias at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 1 15:48:43 EDT 2014

On Jun 28, 2014, at 8:15 PM, Steve Graham wrote:

> I'd like to ask some questions as I go through the book.


As you could tell, you are at the right place. People respond quickly and correctly. 


> Is the book appropriate for learning Scheme in addition to Racket?  What % of the book deals with non-Scheme issues? 

Based on the rest of the thread: 

 (1) yes, you will learn the idea of Scheme from studying this book. 
 (2) no, you will not immediately be able to program in any dialect of Scheme right away. 
 (3) you will have to dig into some Scheme-isms if you wish to do that and you may have to port some of the gui libraries that Realm relies on (or learn to program to another Scheme-specific GUI lib). 
 (4) but if you are going to stick to Racket -- a distinct member of the Lisp family -- you will find that things just work wherever you program.

A note of caution if you're mostly interested in GUI programming. Realm's style of GUI is radically functional. That's for pedagogical reasons -- the book serves a wide spectrum of people. The Realm GUI library is suitable for many tasks but it definitely has its limits. (As its designer/maintainer I am amazed how far users have taken it.) The good news is that Racket offers additional GUI toolbox(es) and that it is relatively easy to move from Realm's world-based approach to Racket's more conventional API. 

;; --- 

I believe the question on w vs interval has been answered by others, especially Marco. If you have questions on this convention, ask again. 





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