Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jcubic 896 days ago
LIPS has documentation builtin into every function. You can see the docstring when you hover over the name of the symbol in the REPL. It also has auto-indent. Also if you press enter you can get back and modify previous lines of code. History doesn't repeat lines only full S-Expressions so it's easy to rerun a big chunk of code.

Even though Try Gambit is a REPL it's not very user-friendly.
1 comments
feeley 895 days ago
The try.gambitscheme.org web app has most of these features and more:

- REPL history with up/down arrows (explained on the landing page's README)

- You can use the "help" procedure to browse the full documentation

- TAB key for autocompletion

- In addition to the REPL there is a code editor to edit programs stored in the browser

- The system supports multiple threads, one REPL per thread

- There is a builtin tutorial to learn the basics of Scheme with examples executable in the REPL with a single click on a "run" button

- The REPL supports single stepping the execution of code

- Easy interface to JS with the SIX syntax extension, e.g. (let ((msg "hello")) \console.log(`msg, 1+2/3))

- The error messages are clear and precise giving the file and line number and highlighting in yellow the piece of code (in the REPL or file) that raised the exception. Just try this in both systems to see the difference:

    > (define (f x) (/ 1 (* x x)))
    > (f 5)
    > (f "hello") ;; the * procedure will raise an exception and highlight "(* x x)"
link
jcubic 895 days ago
- in Gambit History works on lines not S-Expressions like in LIPS

- With LIPS you don't need any new syntax to integrate with JavaScript you just use JavaScript directly (let ((msg "hello") (console.log msg)) SIX syntax doesn't look like Scheme.

- Help popup documentation, with LIPS you have documentation directly in the REPL (when you hover over the symbol) and you can access docstring as strings and assign them to values.

- You can create new syntax similar to scheme vectors and make representation the same as code

- You can manipulate almost everything in the language like environments that you can modify

- LIPS show stack trace not one line which gives an error that makes it easier to find where the error happens.

- The Bookmarks allow to run the REPL on every page even PDF files with R7RS spec.

- You can actually run the code that uses quotes (’ The apostrophe symbol) from the spec if you use syntax extension to add new syntax.

link