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Forum for basic questions?
1 point by yayitswei 5367 days ago | 5 comments
Hi, I was wondering where would be an good place to ask basic questions about arc? Seems like most of you folks posting here are active contributors to the project. Hope to get there in the not-too-distant future!

My first question is, what does the * at the end of a variable or function mean (e.g. comments*), or is it just a notation for the reader?

Secondly, I'm trying to set up mzscheme on Ubuntu Hardy, but the only binary I could find (on here http://download.racket-lang.org/installers/recent/racket-textual/) is for Jaunty, and it doesn't seem to run after installing:

    wei@wei:/usr/mz/bin$ ./mzscheme
    -bash: ./mzscheme: No such file or directory
I tried compiling from source but it hangs during compile. Any suggestions?


3 points by zck 5366 days ago | link

I'm not an arc expert, but I think that posting here would be just fine -- the community isn't large enough to warrant fracturing into multiple different forums. Besides, who better to answer questions than people hacking in Arc? They don't bite. :)

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2 points by fallintothis 5367 days ago | link

This is the right place to ask basic questions -- don't be scared, we're glad to answer. :) E.g., I've answered the question about asterisks before: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11104. (The short answer is that it's a naming convention for global variables.)

To your second question, MzScheme was renamed to Racket; see http://racket-lang.org/new-name.html. Did you try ./racket instead of ./mzscheme?

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1 point by yayitswei 5367 days ago | link

Wow, thanks for your speedy response!

I did try ./racket too-- what's weird to me is that the files are there, and executable, but I can't run them. Have you seen this behavior before?

  wei@wei:/usr/plt/bin$ ls
  total 6.3M
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  616 Jun  6 03:31 tex2page
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  606 Jun  6 03:31 swindle
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.0K Jun  6 03:31 slideshow
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  624 Jun  6 03:31 slatex
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  613 Jun  6 03:31 setup-plt
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  614 Jun  6 03:31 scribble
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  593 Jun  6 03:31 raco
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.4M Jun  6 03:31 racket
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  618 Jun  6 03:31 plt-web-server
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  610 Jun  6 03:31 plt-r6rs
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  610 Jun  6 03:31 plt-r5rs
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  608 Jun  6 03:31 plt-help
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.0K Jun  6 03:31 plt-games
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  616 Jun  6 03:31 planet
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  628 Jun  6 03:31 pdf-slatex
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  625 Jun  6 03:31 mztext
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  16K Jun  6 03:31 mzscheme
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  623 Jun  6 03:31 mzpp
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  615 Jun  6 03:31 mzc
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.0K Jun  6 03:31 mred-text
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root  16K Jun  6 03:31 mred
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.0K Jun  6 03:31 gracket-text
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 3.9M Jun  6 03:31 gracket
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.0K Jun  6 03:31 drscheme
  -rwxrwxr-x 1 root root 2.0K Jun  6 03:31 drracket
  wei@wei:/usr/plt/bin$ ./racket
  -bash: ./racket: No such file or directory
Thanks,

Wei

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3 points by evanrmurphy 5366 days ago | link

I'm not sure, but maybe you need to do something like

  chmod +x racket
before it will work as an executable? You might also try the users@racket-lang.org mailing list, #racket on freenode.net, or one of the other resources at http://racket-lang.org/community.html to get input on this problem.

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2 points by fallintothis 5366 days ago | link

That is weird. Do you remember the options you gave the installer? Can you reproduce this problem on a fresh install with those same options (the installer probably created a racket-uninstall script)? If the installer created them (try which racket), do the /usr/bin ones work? I really don't know what's up. I'm still running mzscheme v4.2.1, so I'm not sure if/why Racket would create all those binaries with the old names, either -- mzscheme, drscheme, etc.

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