[plt-dev] `rico' and ".rkt"

[Just responding to bullets where I have particular opinions:]

At Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:13:46 -0500, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> * I'm ambivalent about having a monolithic "racket" or "rico" command.  
> A small downside is that monolitic does feel more like a closed 
> platform.  A small upside is that it looks (deceptively) friendly in demos.

I think `rico' should have a plug-in interface (registration via
"info.rkt"), so that it can better serve as the one-stop executable for
all development tasks.

> * The suggested automagical games like transparently translating 
> filename extensions.  A variation on this would be to *stop* having 
> filename extensions in things like require specs.  Instead, to turn what 
> essentially is a file reference into a filename, an ".rkt" would be 
> appended.  As a backward-compatibility measure, ".ss" would be permitted 
> in the spec, and either (I'm not sure which) would prevent ".rkt" being 
> added, or would try one extension first and fallback to the other.

There are many normalization and transition problems here. Although I
don't like automagical conversions, the transition path looks way too
painful unless we equate ".ss" and ".rkt" in module paths. For example,
a lot of code that refers to collection- and Planet-based libraries
using ".ss" forms.