[plt-dev] new language dialog, iii

On Jan 30, Robby Findler wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> > On Jan 30, Robby Findler wrote:
> >> And there are lots of other thigns that are observable if I do
> >> that: thread creation, possibly or who knows what. And who knows
> >> what strange state the user's program is in? Maybe the code
> >> doesn't work when some strange parameter setting is done or
> >> something like that.
> >
> > I still don't see your point.  There are already differences
> > between drscheme and mzscheme in that drscheme runs more syntax
> > expansions, and running the lang parser one more time sounds to me
> > much less noticeable than that.
> 
> No, that's only because you've got the errortrace checkbox checked.
> You can uncheck it. That checkbox is just the same as setting up
> errortrace yourself in a mred program and running it there, also.
> 
> But that aside, this is worse because it runs at unpredictable times
> (relative to the user program); DrScheme will need to get language
> info whenever you edit the lang line, for example.

The bottom line is that the reader belongs in the user's context.
Pushing it to some new sandbox is not going to make things right: it
will be difficult to do, it will make language readers very restricted
(for example, they won't be able to consult random files), and the
reader would *still* need to be completely side-effect-free.  For
example of the last point, if the reader consults some external
resource to decide on some unique id, then it will make two decisions
for the two cases.

If you really want to avoid running it twice, and if you want it to
run in the user context (which IMO is a requirement), then the only
other way I can think of is setting up some event listener --
something like a parameter that holds a function that will be invoked
as soon as the language is parsed.  DrScheme could then hook on to
that and display the text with the exact information.

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