[racket] syntax, differently

From: Matthias Felleisen (matthias at ccs.neu.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 31 11:00:18 EDT 2010

	
Shriram's proposal and a private conversation with Mike suggested the following feature requests for the drracket teaching languages: 

1. Could drracket limit the width of programs in the teaching language world to 80 columns? 

2. Could drracket reindent all every time a programmer hits {return | run | submission server request }? 

These two alone would help ensure that programs look better than what we currently see. The reindent all would also immediately suggest to students missing parens etc. It would disallow the behavior where students spend time inserting N spaces at the beginning of the line. 

;; --- 

Once we solve these two problems, I think we should consider one other problem: 

* when to break lines. I am not sure how to enforce style rules in beginner languages because I have my own style that I personally enforce to the point of editing student programs. E.g.

	(place-image IMAGE 
		     X-EXPRESSION Y-EXPRESSION
		     BACKGROUND-IMAGE)

is my preferred breakage for this one function. For others I follow old Scheme norms. 

-- Matthias


 	

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