[racket] newb: implementation of select items

I think you have some of the right ideas.

Two additional ideas to consider...

* Usually you will have some data representation of objects that will be 
drawn and manipulated.  This might be as simple as a list of structs or 
Racket objects, and (in an OOPL way).  If you're making a simple 
graphical editor, these might have objects like `editor-circle`, which 
knows its position, size, and color, as well as has methods like "draw 
this object on given graphic context" and "does this object intersect 
with given selection rectangle?".  The coordinates for these objects 
will probably be in a "world" coordinate system, which stays the same 
regardless of whatever scaling, scrolling, rotating, etc. is going on in 
your editor.  One of the many implications of the methods, to answer one 
of your questions, is that, when you are dragging out your selection 
rectangle, you can just traverse this list, asking each object whether 
it intersects with the rectangle.  (If your editor gets more 
sophisticated, or has to deal with , or you can get fancier with your 
data structures, which would include making the selection more efficient 
than O(n).)

* When you are looking at doing drawing that is expensive, such as 
highlighting objects as you drag the selection rectangle over them, 
consider how using off-screen buffers can make that computationally 
easier.  You might have heard of "double-buffering" as a technique for 
avoiding flicker in animations, but you can use similar techniques for 
things like capturing a baseline drawing state and then doing fast 
incremental changes atop that (say, for highlighting objects during a 
select rectangle drag, or for dragging selected objects).

Also, I beg people not to use all-caps for constants.  All-caps are too 
useful for syntax transformer variables (which is also a use more 
consistent with the original reason that people started using all-caps 
for constants, which wasn't because they were constants but because they 
were involved in... syntax transformation).  And, anyway, more 
descriptive than `WIDTH` is `editor-frame-width`.

Neil V.