I've seen this before. What's happening, somehow, is that every time you write more than one line in a definition at the REPL in a Windows prompt, a capital R is being inserted at each newline. Arc compiles this to the Racket code _R, and when Racket executes this, it can't find the _R variable.
I seem to remember I used work around this by always pasting my multi-line definitions from a text editor rather than writing them directly at the REPL.
Oh, sorry. Now that I test it, I realize I remembered incorrectly.
The only time I get those spurious R characters is when I paste code into the REPL and then press enter manually. I don't get them when typing multi-line definitions directly at the REPL, and I don't get them if the code I'm pasting already has a line break at the end.
So the habit I've formed is to make sure the code I'm pasting already has a line break at the end.
I notice this issue also happens on Racket 5.3.3 -- I'm a few versions behind -- and it does not happen in the REPLs for Node.js or Clojure. It's some kind of bug in Racket. (Hmm... Racket's port.c has a bunch of spaghetti code for CRLF processing. Maybe the bug's in there somewhere.)
My money's on the first or last one working. (Obviously this assumes you _have_ a `C:\users` directory) I would similarly bet that you might need to capitalize the drive, even though Windows drive letters are case insensitive (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...). So if it doesn't work with lowercase letters, try it as above.
Can you try it without the drain, just read the first line from the file?
Edit 10 minutes later: here's a few things I would try:
; a relative path with no slashes/backslashes
(read-all "mccf2.txt")
; inline read-all
(w/infile file "mccf2.txt" (drain (readline file)))
; try reading just the first line
(w/infile file "mccf2.txt" (readline file))
So it looks like the inlined version works, but wrapping it in a function doesn't? Very strange. Paste these lines one at a time into a fresh arc session and show me what you get in response to each line.
(w/infile file "Log.txt" (drain (readline file))) ; just to set a baseline
(def foo (filename) (prn "AAA") (w/infile f filename (prn "BBB") (drain (do1 (readline f) (prn "CCC")))))
(foo "Log.txt")
(def foo (filename) (prn "AAA") (w/infile f filename (prn "BBB") (readline f)))
(foo "Log.txt")
I think rocketnia has figured it out. Does rocketnia's comment http://arclanguage.org/item?id=19137 make sense? Basically you shouldn't get an error if you type in this expression character by character, but you should if you paste it into an arc session without a trailing <enter>.