[plt-scheme] Stylistic (I hope!) question regarding driver loop

On Jan 21, 2006, at 3:24 PM, Robby Findler wrote:

> (FWIW, You can test this out yourself. This program:
> <<snip>>

It would be nice if one were able to switch to the HtDP languages and  
then use the stepper to illustrate these ideas, rather than just  
relying on inferences based on how the computer is behaving as memory  
usage grows.  After all, a user could have instead inferred that  
DrScheme itself had a memory leak, rather than the program text.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to run Robby's first example in the HtDP  
languages; the semantics for letrec in the Student Languages seems to  
be different than in the Pretty Big language.

I tried adapting the examples to programs that the Student languages  
could handle, but eventually I realized that the Stepper doesn't ever  
"garbage collect" the intermediate definitions that it generates  
(when it processes local/let/letrec), so the only way to use it to  
illustrate tail recursion is to tell the human viewer to do the  
garbage collection in their heads.

To make this concrete: type the following into DrScheme under the  
Intermediate Student language

(define (f x) (local ((define y x)) (f 1)))
(define (g x) (local ((define y (g 1))) y))
; (f 1) ;; uncomment this after you see what stepping through (g 1) does
(g 1)

And then compare what hitting the Step button gives you for (f 1)  
versus (g 1).  The main problem is that (f 1) generates a series of  
y_0, y_1, y_2, ... definitions, but the y_i's are never referenced by  
the expression at the bottom of the Step, so they should be garbage  
collected if you want to illustrate that the memory usage of (f 1) is  
bounded using the stepper.


Having said this, I don't know whether adding a garbage collection  
"step" to the Stepper would be worth the cost; the stepper's output  
doesn't seem to scale up to large programs, so its only use would be  
to illustrate tail-recursion for something like Robby's examples.

Since you can already illustrate tail-recursion very concretely in  
the Stepper with programs like:
	(define (hi x) (+ 1 (hi x)))	
	(define (ho x) (ho (+ 1 x)))
adding a gc-step to the Stepper doesn't seem like it would be of much  
use.

Robby: does the Scheme semantics you and Jacob did in PLT Redex have  
a gc-step?  Do your examples run in that context?  Perhaps that would  
help Greg see what is going on in your example programs.

-Felix