[racket] Saving function bodies in Beginning Student Language

On Jun 27, 2011, at 2:40 PM, Gregory Marton wrote:

> This is also important because, at the moment, WeScheme doesn't have a stepper, and DrRacket's stepper has a (reported) bug about relative teachpack paths, so using the stepper has been challenging.

I haven't seen this bug report but that's definitely something to be looked into. I'll forward the message to people who can 



> More generally, I think facilities like procedure-source would be useful to others writing pedagogical software with the beginning student language or other student languages.

The stepper does know how to recover the source of a procedure with just such a trick. And yes, when Stephen Chang constructed the stepper for the lazy language, it came up too. 

;; --- 

For your specific task, you may wish to look into Redex. We tend to think of Redex as a programming language modeling tool, but Robby uses it in his classroom presentations to show reduction sequences for specific functions. Since Redex is hosted within Racket, you could also hook up a gui or a web browser or whatever to show things. 

(One of the things we discovered a couple of years back is that Redex is a fantastic way to show probabilistic algorithms, but now we're beyond middle school :-) a bit)

-- Matthias