[gambit-list] DrScheme and GambitC

Alex Sandro Queiroz e Silva asandroq at gmail.com
Tue Sep 2 14:42:48 EDT 2008


Hallo,

William Cook wrote:
> Alex,
> 
> Scheme is an imperative language, and anyway I'd like to see my 
> let-bindings when I'm inside a function. I don't believe the claims that 
> Scheme doesn't need a traditional debugger because it is somehow 
> different. It is true that traditional debuggers don't work for Haskell, 
> but they do for Scheme.
> 
> I've been programming on and off in Lisp and Scheme for almost 30 years 
> (and yes, i started young!), so I'm not exactly a newbie. What makes me 
> an outsider in this community is that I never got excited about Emacs.
> 

      I am sorry I misunderstood you. But I stand to my claim. Of course 
Scheme is unlike Haskell and one can program thus:

(define (my-func a b)
   (set! a b)
   (let ((c (something))
         (d a))
     (set! c (other thing)
     ...))

There is not any technical problem with that. But as I said before, 
*well-written* Scheme programs are not a sequence of instructions. Even 
loops are functions calls. State-machines change state with function 
calls, not assigning a variable. You may need to put breakpoints inside 
a function, but I did not ever had the need. I am trying to just give 
advice here, please forgive me if I am being too dense.

Lisp is not as much functional because of the lack of proper tail call 
optimisations, and is much more imperative.

Cheers,
-alex
http://www.ventonegro.org/



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