[gambit-list] Re: Gambit is great: the manual should advertise better

Bill Richter richter at math.northwestern.edu
Sun Feb 6 23:39:09 EST 2005


   > But I think Gambit is a lot better than the manual would indicate
   > to a non-expert schemer like me.  I have 4 "advertising" tips:

   Thanks for the advertising tips.  I will see what I can do.  It
   should be clear now that I don't like hype...  What you read (in
   the docs) is what you get.

Thanks, Marc.  That's an admirable attitude, and I wouldn't want more
hype than what you already wrote on page 1:

   With appropriate declarations in the source code the executable
   programs generated by the compiler run roughly as fast as
   equivalent C programs.

But there's a real question, which I don't know the answer to: who do
you want to use Gambit?  If you only want experts like Brad (who 10
years ago told me to use Gambit, but I was intimidated (and thanks for
the GC tip!)) to use Gambit, the manual is fine.  Maybe you only mean
Gambit to be a tool of the serious scientific computing community.  

But maybe you want all DrScheme users who need a real speed increase!
If so, I recommend explaining how usable Gambit is to non-experts like
me.  Since Gambit is case-sensitive, the DrScheme users only need to
port various functions, mostly explained in their book HtDP, so you
can leave that as an exercise (which even I had no trouble with), or
write blinding-speed versions yourself.  I know you can write much
faster quicksort and mergesort functions than mine.

I largely harp about usability because I posted on Oct 17, 2004:

      [gambit-list] help with port from DrScheme?

      ... Does Gambit have a case sensitive mode?  I didn't see
      anything like this in the info files, ...

That was pretty dumb of me, because reading your manual in Emacs info,
(Info-search "case-sensitive") 
immediately takes me to the node that explains it (a bit opaquely):

   The `s' option selects standard Scheme mode.  In this mode the
   reader is case-insensitive and keywords are not recognized.  The
   `S' option selects Gambit Scheme mode (the reader is case-sensitive
   and recognizes keywords which end with a colon).  By default Gambit
   Scheme mode is used.

Well, I get nothing from (Info-search "case sensitive").

But my point is that I got no response!  Nobody posted, "RTFM!  By
default Gambit is case-sensitive!"

-- 
Best,
Bill 


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