DrScheme 360 review

DrScheme is an interactive, integrated, graphical programming environment for the Scheme, MzScheme, and MrEd programming languages

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 13775K Developer: Eli Barzilay

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DrScheme is an interactive, integrated, graphical programming environment for the Scheme, MzScheme, and MrEd programming languages. DrScheme runs under Windows (95 and up), Mac OS X, and Unix/X. Download DrScheme.

DrScheme provides source highlighting for syntax and run-time errors, support for multiple language levels, an algebraic stepper, objects, modules, a GUI library, TCP/IP, and much more. It includes an extensive, hyper-linked help system called Help Desk, available from the Help menu. The Tour of DrScheme describes many of these features in greater detail.

You can enhance DrScheme with many add-ons, including MrFlow, a static debugger, and MysterX, which adds COM support under Windows. See also Dynamic Libraries.

Installation

This is a self-installing shell script. You should run it by either running sh file.sh with the file as an argument, or run chmod +x file.sh on the file to make it executable and then run it.

The installer will verify its integrity, then ask you a few questions about the place you want to install the PLT tree at. Optionally, it can create some links in standard directories like links in the system's lib and the man directories.

Note: These binaries were compiled on a recent Linux configuration (Fedora Core). If you get some libc-related errors then you should try the Linux/GCC2 distribution that was compiled on an older configuration. (Or other builds, depending onavailability.)

Requirements:
Unix running the X Window System.
DrScheme is useful with at least 128 MB of RAM in your computer.
Installing DrScheme requires roughly 40 MB of disk space.

What's New in This Release:
A macro stepper for DrScheme was added.
A Lazy Scheme language was added, similar to Scheme with call-by-need semantics.
You can mix lazy code with eager code using a lazy language module.
Support was added for prompts and composable continuations, resembling Sitaram's tagged "%" and "fcontrol" operators.
A new "control.ss" library provides "prompt", "control", "shift", "reset", "spawn", "splitter", and "cupto". New regexp support includes "Perl-compatible" features and improved performance.
Compiler improvements include a lambda-lifting pass and better handling of "call-with-values".
The "readline" collection is included.