[plt-scheme] Perplexed Programmers

On Aug 31, 2007, at 11:06, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> On Aug 30, 2007, at 1:50 PM, Geoffrey S. Knauth wrote:
>> Can we make a library of structure and algorithm templates for  
>> DrScheme that can be called up at the press of a button?
>
> Absolutely. And it would be a disaster for beginning students. We  
> knew this in 1995 and we had a request for that in 1996 from a  
> colleague at Rice. He was in graphics and came from the Fortran  
> compiler community. Code was code.

I see your point.  Maybe after a student writes a template, there  
could be a Check Template feature.  The template patterns you want  
people to learn could be given names.  After a student creates a  
template, a recognizer would look at it and tell the student, "This  
fits the Xyz pattern."  If that's what the student intended, great.   
If the recognizer didn't like the template, it would say, "I don't  
recognize this" or "This almost looks like Xyz," leading the student  
to keep trying.