Programming Language – Page 46

Scratch Programming

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.
Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.

I wonder how this compared to PLT Worlds.
(via plt)

When it Comes to R7RS; R6RS Users are Quiet

R6RS users don’t seem to have much to say about R7RS. Most R6RS users seem to happy with Scheme and busy using it rather than worrying about how it should be split into two parts (little and big).

Change the REPL Prompt in Ikarus

Aziz added the ability to change the REPL prompt in the latest revision of Ikarus:

(waiter-prompt-string "")

(via ikarus-users)

Using Syntax Highlighting to Flag Mutation

As Robby describes here, in a recent build of DrScheme he added mutation flagging to the syntax-highlighting.

Using Doxygen with MATLAB

Here is the link for a utility that converts MATLAB code to C so that Doxygen can generate documentation from it.

Java Control Flow: Do you really grok it?

Manu put out a challenge to it here.

bzlib/dbi – an extensible database interface for PLT

bzlib/dbi has just been made available via planet – inspired by Perl DBI, it is an extensible database interface, currently with the following drivers implemented:
bzlib/dbd-spgsql – wraps around schematics/spgsql
bzlib/dbd-jsqlite – wraps around jaymccarthy/sqlite
bzlib/dbd-jazmysql – wraps around jaz/mysql
bzlib/dbi/app – a kill-safe wrapper over raw database handles
bzlib/dbi/pool – a database connection pool wrapper
So if you need to switch within the three databases you now can do so more easily, and you get database connection pools and kill-safe wrappers for free.
You can find more details at http://weblambda.blogspot.com/2009/09/extensible-abstract-database-interace.html – which explains more in details about the interface.

(via PLT)

SRFI Libraries for Chez Scheme

Thanks to the efforts of the SRFI authors, the R6RS SRFI library team, and Aaron, Chez has the portable R6RS SRFI libraries up and running on it.
A single R6RS code-base used among all of the different R6RS implementations means substantial code-reuse, and all of the benefits that it brings.
(via comp.lang.scheme)

Why PLT Scheme disllows one-armed ifs

In 1991 I asked Bob Hieb (Kent’s Chez Scheme buddy then, and my co-researcher on theoretical stuff) what the most frequent annoying bug was in the code. He ranked an accidentally omitted else branch among the top three. Indeed, he said that because of this, they had agreed to use WHEN and UNLESS exclusively for cases when they needed a one-armed IF and that they considered all one-armed uses as a bug or a legacy issue (which they corrected as soon as they touched a file).
We have chosen to codify their restriction. It’s a minor inconvenience that buys a good deal of clarity

(via plt)

Help PLT Scheme: Write a DataGrid UI Control

This post shares what has been previously on the list; PLT Scheme needs a DataGrid UI control. If you are interested, this is a great place to start contributing as a lot of people would use and appreciate it.