[racket] Questions from a new user

On Sat, 28 Jun 2014 11:15:27 -0700
Steve Graham <jsgrahamus at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hello, all.  I just purchased Realm of Racket and am working my way
> through it.  Although I've been programming for 30+ years, most of
> that has been with procedural languages (MUMPS, FORTRAN and COBOL) on
> character-based medical information systems (i.e. reports, EDI and
> utilities).  This is one of my first attempts at GUI and functional
> programming and I'm enjoying it a lot.  Thanks to the creators of
> Racket and Scheme!
> 
> I'd like to ask some questions as I go through the book.
> 
> Is the book appropriate for learning Scheme in addition to Racket?

As far as I can tell Racket is somehow a super set of Scheme. I think
when learning Racket it is easy to go back to some Scheme then if you
like. Even Racket could be used as Scheme when you specify it as a
language. In a .rkt file you would start this way:
 
 #lang r6rs

In DrRacket you could choose r6rs as a language.


> What % of the book deals with non-Scheme issues?  In the GUI version

Not quite sure what you mean when saying 'non-Scheme issues'? The GUI
is just a library written in Scheme. Would be the same if you would use
Cobol in Windows and using a GUI library in Cobol.


> of Guess My Number many of the functions/procedures have an argument
> of w, which I understand to be world.  Why is world the argument
> instead of, say, interval?
> 

As I'm not much of an expert in world programming I would need a
concrete example.


I'm not the expert so others may be able to give better answers.


-- 
Manfred