[plt-scheme] init-field order?

Matthew:  Thank you very much for all three of my questions.

I'm engaged in updating some software for which I used mzscheme nine
years ago.  It's been running happily on a DOS machine ever since, but I
can't find good spares any more for that machine, so have had to update
things.  I have not kept abreast of changes in mzscheme, and I have to
say, from my Rip van Winkle experience that things have changed in the
mzscheme world.  Between the new class system, and the mzchar/unicode
changes, updating has not been a painless process.

When I first chose to use mzscheme, it seemed small and lightweight, and
perfect for the job at hand, which was adapting it to control a
disparate bunch of A/V equipment and robot controllers I built for a
stage show.  Using scheme was much more interesting, fun and flexible
than the commercial show control applications out there, and allowed me
to do branching and the like, and be confident that pretty much whatever
need I'd have, I wouldn't have to change systems again, since I could
adapt my system endlessly.

The interpreter still seems fast and flexible, but the newer
documentation seems somewhat more telegraphic than the older parts, and
seems to be written for people who are already PhDs in computer science.
I found the class system documentation especially opaque, but the
documentation of what is and is not an mzchar or UCS-4 was also fairly
challenging to parse.  In several cases during this push, after I
already understood the issue (from an answer on this list, or from
experimentation), I went back and easily found the single sentence that
would have explained the issue to me.  But I'd rather have found it
first. 

(I tried the class100, incidentally, but I think maybe the classes I'd
used had even been an earlier version of the system, and I was already
partway down the road to converting them.)

Anyway, I'm still grateful for the work you all have done, and happy to
have stumbled on it back when, but hope that you will find a little
criticism useful to make the system even better than it is.

Yours,

 -tom

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