3 ms·

I'm glad you like Racket, and you're right about some of the weaknesses, especially in providing guidance and examples for how to do things. I have questions a

by samth 12y ago

I'm glad you like Racket, and you're right about some of the weaknesses, especially in providing guidance and examples for how to do things. I have questions about points 3 and 4. For 3, do you mean it's hard to figure out how the implementation of something works, especially when that something is a complex macro? If so, I can't disagree. For 4, if you just run Racket programs at the command line, you should get stack traces (although less nice than the ones errortrace provides). Do you not get those?

bad_login 12y ago
For 4 if i run from the command line (racket 5.93) i just get the contract violation message, which don't provide positional informations, it's not usefull when you have a list contract error with dozen of uses in a file. For 3 i mean the words like 'visiting', 'instantiated', the phases, the syntax transformer there are many things to grasp. For instance i used to believe that phase 1 bindings where the functions executed by the expander instead of the one defined by define-syntax. For complex macro i just expand it that's fine. Other point the continuation is hard to grasp, i really understand when i see http://www.infoq.com/presentations/continuations-web-os http://www.infoq.com/presentations/continuations-web-os, the key point that help me is the fact he mentions continuation capture also the exit. Another flaws i didn't mention is messages of typed/racket could be hard to understand especially one involving parametric function, this problem occur time to time in the mailing list. I know you take this kind of problems seriously. A point why i like racket is because it's lexical scoped but also let me precise the portion i want more dynamism in with parameters or with eval + namespace. Racket also miss some tooling the one come in mind is coding standard checker and formater, it could be done with free-identifier=? and have some rules. New macro could write their associated rule as metadata in a submodule. Is it doable, i mean technically not the fact to expect macro writer will write such rules?
- samth 12y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. Certainly there are lots of complicated concepts to learn in the macro system. On 4, if I run this program: https://gist.github.com/8fbc12877e2639c5f94c https://gist.github.com/8fbc12877e2639c5f94c I get a backtrace like this: [samth@huor:~] r ~/tmp/x.rkt /: contract violation expected: number? given: '(1 2 3 400 500 600) argument position: 2nd other arguments...: 6 context...: /home/samth/tmp/x.rkt: [running body] There's no other stack frames because `average` is inlined, but if you have more complicated functions you should get more stack frames.

by samth 12y ago

bad_login 12y ago

For 4 if i run from the command line (racket 5.93) i just get the contract violation message, which don't provide positional informations, it's not usefull when you have a list contract error with dozen of uses in a file. For 3 i mean the words like 'visiting', 'instantiated', the phases, the syntax transformer there are many things to grasp. For instance i used to believe that phase 1 bindings where the functions executed by the expander instead of the one defined by define-syntax. For complex macro i just expand it that's fine. Other point the continuation is hard to grasp, i really understand when i see http://www.infoq.com/presentations/continuations-web-os http://www.infoq.com/presentations/continuations-web-os, the key point that help me is the fact he mentions continuation capture also the exit. Another flaws i didn't mention is messages of typed/racket could be hard to understand especially one involving parametric function, this problem occur time to time in the mailing list. I know you take this kind of problems seriously. A point why i like racket is because it's lexical scoped but also let me precise the portion i want more dynamism in with parameters or with eval + namespace. Racket also miss some tooling the one come in mind is coding standard checker and formater, it could be done with free-identifier=? and have some rules. New macro could write their associated rule as metadata in a submodule. Is it doable, i mean technically not the fact to expect macro writer will write such rules?

samth 12y ago
Thanks for the feedback. Certainly there are lots of complicated concepts to learn in the macro system. On 4, if I run this program: https://gist.github.com/8fbc12877e2639c5f94c https://gist.github.com/8fbc12877e2639c5f94c I get a backtrace like this: [samth@huor:~] r ~/tmp/x.rkt /: contract violation expected: number? given: '(1 2 3 400 500 600) argument position: 2nd other arguments...: 6 context...: /home/samth/tmp/x.rkt: [running body] There's no other stack frames because `average` is inlined, but if you have more complicated functions you should get more stack frames.