[racket] Unexpected error extracting value from request bindings.

All good points. I should also mention that formlets do this
automatically, which is why you don't name the fields when using
formlets.

Jay

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 11:08 PM, Neil Van Dyke <neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
> You are correct that it is effectively black magic, in that you probably
> don't need to know about it right now.  Only a small percentage of Racket
> programmers will ever need to know about it.
>
> When you look at the "reference/symbols.html" page of Racket documentation,
> pretend that you don't see anything other than "symbol?", "string->symbol",
> and "symbol->string".  You will probably use those three procedures a lot,
> and you will probably never need to use anything else on that page.
>
> I suggest making your own somewhat "gensym"-like procedure, tailored to your
> needs.  If you're, say, generating symbols that must be unique only within a
> single generated Web page, write your own procedure to support doing exactly
> that.  In this procedure, you will naturally use "string->symbol", and
> consequently procedures like "eq?", "memq", and "assq" will simply work like
> you'd expect (no black magic).  As an example, here's one utility procedure
> you might write, which itself produces a "gensym"-like procedure that you
> can use in the context of, say, generating a single Web page:
>
> ;; Definition of your utility procedure:
> (define (make-serially-numbered-symbol-maker prefix-string)
>  (let ((serial-number 0))
>   (lambda ()
>     (let ((last-serial-number serial-number))
>       (set! serial-number (+ 1 serial-number))
>       (string->symbol (string-append prefix-string
>                                      (number->string
> last-serial-number)))))))
>
> ;; Example use of that utility procedure:
> (let ((my-make-symbol (make-serially-numbered-symbol-maker "foo-")))
>  (list (my-make-symbol)
>       (my-make-symbol)
>       (my-make-symbol)))
> ;;==> '(foo-0 foo-1 foo-2)
>
> If a procedure that produces new procedures seems a little too fancy-pants
> right now, you can do a similar thing in a block of your code that needs the
> symbols made, without the part about producing a procedure.  The nice thing
> here about a procedure that produces a new procedure is that it's a good way
> to put this code into a reusable library, rather merely having a code
> pattern that you retype or copy&paste every time you need to do a similar
> thing.
>
> Esoterica #1: If you wanted the produced symbol maker (in the example above,
> a particular "my-make-symbol" value) to be callable from multiple threads
> simultaneously, then the code should be modified to use a semaphore, so that
> the setting of "last-serial-number" and the incrementing of "serial-number"
> happens in a mutex block.  (The "string->symbol" part could be left out of
> the mutex block, to increase parallelism.)  But you probably don't want to
> be calling the same "my-make-symbol" from multiple threads simultaneously,
> anyway, so I didn't complicate this illustration with a semaphore.
>
> Esoterica #2: You'll see functions like "gensym" and "gentemp" in some old
> Lisp dialects, and they will be used mostly to get around problems of
> non-hygienic macros in that particular dialect.  I don't recall seeing them
> used in real Racket or Scheme code, however, probably because those
> languages have hygienic macros.
>
> Estoterica #3: In some Lisp dialects (not Racket), interned symbols are not
> garbage-collected, so, if you tried to generate unique symbols infinite
> numbers of times in a run of a program, *eventually* they might want to take
> up more space than can be represented by your computer and then by the
> universe.
>
> --
> http://www.neilvandyke.org/
> _________________________________________________
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>



-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93