[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

It's here: 
http://bugs.racket-lang.org/query/?debug=&database=default&cmd=view+audit-trail&cmd=view&pr=11048

>> 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)

Thanks -- I'll look into Redex.

An important piece of this is that I'd like to present the trace/stepper 
alongside the working game, for context.  I can build a nice presentation 
with procedure-source, and I think a generic tool like this might support 
other cool things we haven't even though of yet, so it would be nice to be 
able to turn that on in some context.

Thanks,
Grem

-- 
------ __@   Gregory A. Marton                 http://csail.mit.edu/~gremio
--- _`\<,_                                                     617-858-0775
-- (*)/ (*)    Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
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