[plt-scheme] evaluating buffer w/o re-initializing environment?

Dear Fred,

I am a product of the Emacs world that you are describing below,
and my advisor Dan Friedman was called the "Lispman" on his door
sign at Indiana.

When I first discovered the idea of sending individual expressions
and definitions from a buffer to a repl, it was a near-religious
revelation to me. I wanted everyone to know this trick and use it.
When I started teaching the freshman course at Rice, I told our
chairman so and he asked "why". I was shocked, awed, and I failed
to explain to him how it mattered. He was a mathematician and I
wrote it off. They don't know.

Then I started watching my sophomores and juniors at Rice in lab.
Now that was a true disappointment. Few if any used this trick and
when they did, they more often tripped up and got the repl into a
state where they didn't know what was going on.

In the mid 90s, I wrote some more Little books with Dan, and boy,
time and again, I watched him stumble across the state of the repl.
I even watched him re-start the repl and load the whole buffer more
often than not.

Why? In the presence of macros and higher-order functions and
other beasts, it is difficult for masters of the universe with 30
years of experience to keep track of things. What do you think
students with 10 or 20 days worth of experience will do? Is it
really such a deep principle of computing to create the objects
incrementally in the repl as opposed to thinking systematically
through the design of a program?

I decided not and asked Robby to make DrScheme's repl transparent.
That is, it re-starts the repl and re-loads the buffer every time.
I consider this behavior a suitable compromise: have a repl but
don't confuse yourself with send-defs and send-exprs. This is
especially true in an age when sending an entire buffer takes as
much time as sending an individual expression or definition.
Soon we'll get "compilation behind your back" so that only the
current buffer is re-interpreted. It'll start things even faster.

Even though I had used the incremental mode for more than a decade
when I switched from Emacs to DrScheme in 1998, I have hardly ever
looked back. I miss a few other things but the incremental repl
is one of those rituals old Lispers acquired and never questioned
... but it isn't fundamental and critical to anything

-- Matthias










On Mar 29, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Fred G. Martin wrote:

> Dear PLT-Scheme'rs,
>
> One of the things I really miss in Dr. Scheme is the ability to add
> new definition bindings without losing the state of the global
> environment.  When you evaluate a buffer with F5 or Run, the world is
> reset and then the buffer definitions are evaluated and put back.
>
> Am I missing something easy, or is this a deep design decision?  I
> wish I could introduce my students to the Lisp programming methodology
> of iteratively building up the objects in one's world and the
> procedures for interacting with them.
>
> Fred
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