[racket] Racket newbie questions

Here's a summary of the responses. Thanks to everyone who
replied. My comments are in [ and ]. Not much new though.


On 5/5/2013 9:45 PM, John Gateley wrote:
> Lots of newbie questions:
>
> 1) If I am creating a new class that has a "size" field, what is the
> convention for naming the initialization argument? "size" doesn't
> work! This name must be known by all class creators.
> (class object %
>    (init init-size) ;; init-size cannot be size
>    (define size init-size)
>    ...)

You can use internal names to make this work:

   (class object%
     (super-new)
     (init ([internal-size size]))
     (define size internal-size))

I use a macro that encodes this pattern:

   (define-syntax-rule (init-private field-name)
     (begin (init ([internal field-name]))
            (define field-name internal)))

   (class object%
     (super-new)
     (init-private size))

[Thanks!]


>
> 2) In DrRacket, where is the "save all" menu item? Can I configure
> DrRacket so that when I "Run" (by clicking the Run button) the
> files in the definitions area are automatically saved?

I agree that a 'Save all' item is missing.
You can bind keyboard shortcuts for that.
http://docs.racket-lang.org/drracket/Keyboard_Shortcuts.html

[also]

This might work:

http://planet.plt-scheme.org/display.ss?package=drsync.plt&owner=grettke

[Looks close, but clicking Run/Debug or anything similar should save
by default, or at least be configurable to do that. You don't want to
run code, verify that it is correct, and exit and with a single slip
of the fingers lose the changes that you just tested.]

>
> 3) Are there Eclipse, NetBeans or Visual Studio plugins for Racket?

[No responses here. I didn't get to try the debugger environment last
night due to the crash, but I suspect there's a lot of mileage to be
had in exploiting existing debugging environments over creating the
functionality in DrRacket]

>
> 4) Do you have real-world examples of why (super-new) would not be
> called before anything else in a class?

You might want to compute some values to pass as init arguments to the 
super class. If the computations are big and/or you need to keep 
references to the values yourself, you might define them as fields 
before calling super-new. Or they might depend on your own init args, so 
you would at least declare those first.

[Interesting! I hadn't thought of that, but it seems real. Do you have
any examples?]

>
> 5) Is there an implementation of vectors that can change in size?
> Like C++'s std::vector?


http://docs.racket-lang.org/data/gvector.html

[This is close, but I don't see an operation to explicitly grow the
vector, other than adding one element at the end. For some algorithms,
you want to grow the vector exponentially - doubling the size instead
of adding one element.]

>
> 6) Finally, for tonight, here's a way to crash DrRacket in 64
> bit Windows 7. I've attached two files, main.rkt and manuscript.rkt.
> Start DrRacket, open "main.rkt", open "manuscript.rkt" (which
> opens a second window), switch to the "main.rkt" window, press
> the "Run" button, then press the "Debug" button. You get the dreaded
> "DrRacket has stopped working" dialog.

Assuming that you're using v5.3.3, can you check whether the crash
happen the current candidate for the next release?:

    http://pre.racket-lang.org/release/installers/

[Indeed, it seems to be fixed.]


[Thanks again everyone. No time tonight for much testing, but I will
have more question later. -- j]