Abstract

. Teaching introductory computing courses with Scheme elevates the intellectual level of the course and thus makes the subject more appealing to students with scientific interests. Unfortunately, the poor quality of the available programming environments negates many of the pedagogic advantages. To overcome this problem, we have developed DrScheme, a comprehensive programming environment for Scheme. It fully integrates a graphics-enriched editor, a multi-lingual parser that can process a hierarchy of syntactically restrictive variants of Scheme, a functional read-eval-print loop, and an algebraically sensible printer. The environment catches the typical syntactic mistakes of beginners and pinpoints the exact source location of run-time exceptions. DrScheme also provides an algebraic stepper, a syntax checker and a static debugger. The first reduces Scheme programs, including programs with assignment and control effects, to values (and effects). The tool is useful for explaining the sem...

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