Re: defmacro fails under DrScheme but not under MzScheme

[Hannu Koivisto <azure@iki.fi>]

Shriram Krishnamurthi <shriram@cs.rice.edu> writes:

| I'm afraid I cannot reproduce the behavior you are seeing.  The
| library compat.ss does not define the defmacro form, which is not
| built in, either.  Therefore, I have a feeling some file is being
| loaded in one case but not another.

Ah, you are right.  I had two years old (last time I've used
MzScheme!) ~/.mzschemerc that again loaded SLIB initialization file
that again defined defmacro.  Also, when reading manual's
"Compatibility: compat.ss" section I didn't notice that syntactic
forms are defined in compatm.ss, not compat.ss, so even I only
loaded compat.ss, everything seemed to work thanks to SLIB being
initialized behind my back.

| I'm not sure what you mean by "plain MzScheme" -- by definition,

I mean command line MzScheme running on its own, i.e. no DrScheme
stuff or anything else on top of it.

| MzScheme does not offer any of these facilities.  Likewise, the

Right, it doesn't, and that's why I wondered (I shouldn't have used
"enable") whether it would be possible to load them selectively the
way DrScheme Jr probably does (so your suggestion to use DrScheme
Jr sort of answered my question).

| stepper is fundamentally a graphical program, so it cannot run on a

Well, DrScheme's stepper perhaps is, but in general I can't see any
reason why one couldn't also have a textual stepper like many
Common Lisp implementations do.  I thought that there might be a
possibility that also DrScheme's stepper is layered so that the
graphical stuff is not neccessary and one could run it on a textual
system at least with only few lines of glue code.  On top of a
textual stepper one could also build, for example, Emacs interface.

| textual system.  Perhaps you want to investigate DrScheme Jr, which is 
| a source-correlation-enriched textual version of DrScheme.  It does
| not, however, provide tools such as the Stepper.

Thanks, I'll try DrScheme Jr next time.

-- 
Hannu