[racket] Racket v5.0

Robbie, hello.

On 2010 Jun 8, at 15:25, Robby Findler wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:08 AM, Norman Gray <norman at astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>>  * A useful addition to that page would be 'what do I have to do to make the transition from PLT Scheme to being a first-class Racket programmer?' (as opposed to working in some sort of legacy support mode).  From that page, the answer seems to be 'not very much', but if the transition is indeed as simple as: (1) edit '#lang scheme' to '#lang racket', (2) type 'racket' rather than 'mzscheme', (3) you're done; then it would be reassuring to make that wonderfully transparent (and well done).
> 
> You can do just that, or you can do arbitrarily more.

With PLT-Scheme^WRacket, there's always more beyond...

I suppose I was meaning one or other of:

  * are there quick headlines of what's actually changed (is Racket just PLT Scheme v5.0 plus a name change plus plans for world domination?; or

  * If I carry on using #lang scheme with my shiny new racket executable, am I going to be like one of those "manuals? who needs 'em?" refuseniks who still writes \documentstyle and is kept going by heroic backward-compatibility efforts on the part of the system developers?

----

Y'know, the real thing to do is just to damn well _try_ it...

<20 minutes passes>

...I've just 'converted' a C extension, and a program using it, to Racket.  Doing so consisted of s/#lang scheme/#lang racket/, s/mzscheme/racket/, and s/mzc/raco ctool/ .  Well.  Emmm.  That was ... easy.  I'm not sure what to say.  Well done?

While a 'what's changed' section might still be useful on the documentation page, for reassurance purposes, it certainly doesn't look like a long section.  I'm sure some eq?/eqv?/equal? gag could be worked up there.

Nice work.

All the best,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk