[plt-scheme] One small and one big issue with DrScheme

Well, unlike all other "pedagogic" IDEs, DrScheme has a reliable STOP  
button for infinite loops. (It's possible that others have caught up,  
but I am sure we were first.)

Furthermore, you can and should set the memory limit for REPLs so  
that the memory limit for the REPL thread is distinct from the memory  
limit for the whole system and doesn't take it down. You need to  
teach both ideas to beginners eventually: computations consume space,  
and infinite computations consume unbounded space, plus you as a  
programmer should learn to set the limits in your context.

Thanks for the feedback -- Matthias




On Jul 4, 2008, at 10:43 AM, budu wrote:

> Hi, I'm an occasional DrScheme user (normally I use Emacs) and there
> is some little things I don't like about it. One is keyboard
> shortcuts, which I never been able to change. I found out recently
> about the "Enable keybindings in menus" options, it's great, but I'm
> still missing some of my favorite shortcuts, mainly C-j for newline.
> Maybe the answer lies into the Help Desk, but it totally confuse me,
> it seems like I'm never able to find what I'm searching for.
>
> The bigger issue now is about DrScheme not being as solid as I'd like
> it to be. Maybe I'm too much used to Emacs, because when I use its
> REPL it never crash no matter what. I've lost some code (without any
> importance) this morning because I did try to run a function that
> generate an infinite loop and it crashed DrScheme with an out of
> memory exception. When considering that this IDE is geared toward
> beginners, I find it strange that it can't sustain even a mere
> infinite loop. Maybe that's the price to pay for the great debugging
> features DrSceme have.
>
> BTW, I'm a little late for this but congratulation to the PLT devs for
> version 4, it's a really great release.
>
> _________________________________________________
>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme