[racket-dev] Racket startup

From: Carl Eastlund (cce at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Tue Jun 28 10:24:46 EDT 2011

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> Three minutes ago, Carl Eastlund wrote:
>>
>> The Racketish name would be #%main, wouldn't it?
>
> Yes.  But the problem is that `#%foo' names are intended to be things
> that you don't write in end-user code, only if you implement a new
> language or change some fundamental thing.  In that respect, the `#%'
> feels like serving the same role as `__', which feels dirty.  (I'm
> also trying to imagine the first-time user impression being told to
> define `#%main' vs `main' -- the first looks like it leads to an
> impression of some perl-like language...)

Yeah, I agree completely, I was just looking for alternatives to MAIN.
 Now we need an alternative to both.  What was wrong with just main,
again?  (Looking back... oh, you said not clashing with existing
code.)  Well, we go in for verbose, self-explanatory names (e.g.
current-command-line-arguments), how about the-main-program or
start-program-here or something similar?

--Carl



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