true, i'm not sure why it escaped my mind. probably for a couple reasons. i use Vim, which i'm very happy with and whose editing power i'm not going to be sacrificing anytime soon. i was speaking from the perspective of a common beginner. and also i just didn't like DrScheme when i opened it up. its UI and graphics could use a lot of work
however that's just nitpicky, and DrScheme fits what beginners need. how reasonable would writing an arc language thing for it be? still, if someone had to choose between creating a DrScheme language thing and an Eclipse plugin, i think Eclipse would be the best choice
i'm sure it is very good, i was just talking about the graphical aspects of it. maybe you're referring to my mention of Vim, but i wasn't comparing. Vim is IDE-wise completely lacking, but that's something that doesn't bother me, especially due to its superior-to-all-others editing model. and the reason i say Eclipse would be a better choice is just because it's substantially prettier and more familiar
For editing text Vi and Emacs are preferred by quite a few hackers.
However for editing Scheme, DrScheme is the best choice.
Not because it is "graphical", but simply because it was designed with one purpose only: writing Scheme code.
It has all the standard stuff (such as: to show the documentation on an identifier just press F1), but
it also contain the Scheme specific stuff, that you
won't notice until you try some advanced Scheming.
Among the most impressive features is how precise the error messages are reported. This goes for both standard errors, but not the least when macros are involved. If you compare the error reports you get from a few errorneous macros in DrScheme and in a standard Scheme implementation, you'll see that you can save a lot of time if you use DrScheme.
And while at, don't forget try the macro stepper...
i like drscheme in general. there is one problem with it that made it simply unusable by me. when you hit run in drscheme to reevaluate your definitions, it obliterates my entire history in the REPL. i need to have that stuff around to retry expressions.
