[racket] file will not read into the program

On Nov 21, 2011, at 3:35 PM, Todd O'Bryan wrote:

> This is just a guess, but perhaps Windows has helpfully added a ".txt"
> extension (or some other nonsense) to the end of your filename? You
> might try looking at the file's properties, just to make sure
> something weird isn't going on.

Or just un-checking "Hide extensions for known types" (which is usually the first thing I do when I sit down at a strange Windows machine).

> On another note, as long as your Fahrenheit->Celsius function works,
> don't worry so much about the convert-file interface. That's basically
> one of the "bells and whistles" that HtDP included to get students
> excited. The latest versions of the curriculum have much flashier
> stuff and once you get through about Chapter 20 or so, you can look up
> how to access files directly without using a teachpack.

Speaking of "latest versions of the curriculum", I think most of us would recommend stopping before chapter 6 of HtDP (in fact, you could stop now) and switching to either Picturing Programs (http://www.picturingprograms.org) or HtDP Second Edition (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/).  Both of these take a more graphics-based approach which we have found works better with most of our students.  Picturing Programs starts with graphics from the very beginning, postponing arithmetic until after you've done some event-driven GUI programs, while HtDP2e does some numeric examples at the beginning but starts doing graphics and GUI very soon thereafter.



Stephen Bloch
sbloch at adelphi.edu