Richard Lawrence wrote at 11/30/2010 11:55 AM:
[1] I have so far mostly stayed away from DrRacket, because I know Emacs well and haven't felt the desire or need so far to learn another environment. Is that my problem? Does DrRacket support the kind of bottom-up exploration in the documentation that I'm trying to describe?
I tell people to spend time trying out DrRacket, even if they are long-time Emacs power-users like me.
DrRacket won't give you quite as good an experience in documentation and system code exploration as the Smalltalk-80 system browser, IMHO, but the navigability from code to docs in a Web browser window is pretty good. You might find that features like Check Syntax are good for exploring code, too. DrRacket has a somewhat different take on the REPL, in which it tolerates you experimenting interactively a little while in a dirty REPL in the Interactions pane, but then it wants you to get out of the mud and paste your resulting code into the Definitions (file) pane, where you can hit Ctrl-T to evaluate the code in a fresh environment. Other than Check Syntax, DrRacket's other big feature that can tempt Emacs devotees is the wonderful terrific Macro Stepper.
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