On 8/17/11 10:30 AM, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
My experience last year was that the restrictions on some of these sub-forms were arbitrary and not helpful. It also makes it harder for students because if they click on the "wrong" documentation, they don't understand why the thing that the docs say should work doesn't.
Well, I certainly didn't. The Advanced Student documentation doesn't really explain `match', so one has to go to the Guide or Reference anyway (e.g. for quasipatterns). It takes some careful peering at the grammar of Advanced Student to notice that ASL `match' is restricted, and to figure out what is permissible.
I would like to use `and', `or', and `?' patterns, at least. But to do so I have to take the students into Advanced Student earlier than I want (just after functional abstraction) and forbid them to use all the `!' functions and I/O. However, if I'm only going to get a restricted version of `match' by doing that, I might as well take them into #lang racket.
Okay, maybe I won't go to that extreme yet. Let me see how far I can get without full `match'. --PR
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