[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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