Dear All, Just a friendly warning about name in Universe. The documentation states that in (name expr) expr is used as the title of the canvas. Some of us, however, use expr for more than that. Specifically, you may use expr to identify the world that has taken an action to be communicated to other worlds (e.g., a world moves a rocket and that same movement needs to be mimicked elsewhere with the correct rocket). A "natural" solution would be to identify a rocket in another world using expr. In other words, expr is the "owner" of the rocket it is associated with. When world expr moves the rocket, the corresponding rocket needs to mimick the move in other worlds. This all works like a charm *as long as* every world has a unique name--a bug not easily detected by first-year students is worlds having the same name.
Would it make sense to have universe itself avoid this situation? For example, the server could automatically refuse a world joining if it has a name that is already in use. Yes, I know I could have the students do the checking in their code but I would rather they focus on other stuff like protocol design, marshalling, etc. Suggesting that they check the name before allowing a world to join frustrates students especially when there are bigger fish to fry in the world of distributed programming that they are wrestling with. -- Cheers, Marco Have a´¨) ¸.·´¸.·*´¨) ¸.·*¨) (¸.·´ (¸.·´ * wonderful day! :) ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
