SI 413 Fall 2023 / Admin

This is the archived website of SI 413 from the Fall 2023 semester. Feel free to browse around; you may also find more recent offerings at my teaching page.

DrRacket installation and setup instructions

1 Overview

For Scheme programming, we will use an IDE called DrRacket.

Following the directions below will help, but when using Dr Racket try and always be sure of a couple things:

  • Run DrRacket in Ubuntu (either a VM or WSL). There are DrRacket versions for Windows, but it saves stuff in a different format and is generally a pain for us when trying to grade your work.

  • There are many versions of the Scheme programming language available. Be sure to choose the “Full Swindle” version for your work in this class.

  • The DrRacket editor will let you insert images, “Comment boxes”, and other weird stuff which isn’t actually part of the Scheme langauge and won’t save properly. Don’t do it because then we won’t be able to test your code. Never use comment boxes and always choose to save as plain-text if prompted.

2 Getting DrRacket

Dr. Roche made a handy dandy script to download DrRacket (if not already present) and set up the language preferences for SI413.

When you are connected to the USNA intranet, just run this command:

curl -k -L 'https://faculty.cs.usna.edu/~roche/413/get-racket.sh' | bash

You should run this command on the lab machine for the first time (which will be fast since DrRacket is already installed), and on your Ubuntu VM or WSL on your laptop.