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2 points by zck 3080 days ago | link | parent

Interesting. How many people have you gotten into Arc? You mention that you "found it difficult to explain to beginners how to get an Arc REPL up and running".

Arc 3.1 actually doesn't require an old version of mzscheme -- you can just use racket, and start it with `racket -f as.scm`. And no, the instructions on this site don't say anything about that.

Anarki also has a nice quickstart (https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki).



2 points by urs2102 3077 days ago | link

zck: I would probably say about ten to fifteen people. I was working on designing a LISP/ML like language which had a lot of similarities to Arc, so I went on a bit of an Arc binge and showed it to a bunch of friends at school. I found that it was a little difficult for some people to set up.

Does Arc 3.1 run properly though on MzScheme 372 or does it need to run on Racket?

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2 points by rocketnia 3076 days ago | link

"Does Arc 3.1 run properly though on MzScheme 372 or does it need to run on Racket?"

The only problem I've had running on MzScheme 372 is that it can be awkward to track down documentation for that version. Newer versions sometimes have more features available.

Arc doesn't have all the I/O primitives that Racket has -- Racket has an almost ridiculous variety of primitives for file manipulation, sockets, garbage collection, delimited continuations, FFI, concurrency, UI, etc. -- so Arc programmers have often hacked on the language implementation to support their applications. This hacking happens in Racket (aka MzScheme), so having a nice version of Racket is helpful.

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2 points by zck 3077 days ago | link

That's awesome that you've introduced it to that many people. I haven't really been able to get people interested more than tangentially. Good for you.

>Does Arc 3.1 run properly though on MzScheme 372 or does it need to run on Racket?

I haven't tried running it on MzScheme 372; once I could just use the most recent version of Racket, I decided to just do that. It seems easier than staying on an old version.

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