The Racket platform provides a robust set of tools for developing languages, mostly centered around the macro system and the #lang
protocol, which allows providing arbitrary readers to convert text input to syntax objects representing Racket modules. The REPL is a bit more complicated, however, because it has different rules—each expression needs to be dynamically read, assigned lexical context, expanded, compiled, evaluated, and printed, all in real time. (In that sense, perhaps the phrase “REPL” oversimplifies what Racket is doing, but that’s a separate conversation.)
So how does Racket accommodate this in the face of completely arbitrary user-defined languages, some of which may not even support interactive evaluation in a traditional sense? Racket mostly solves this problem by having a related but distinct set of protocols for managing runtime interactions that operates alongside #lang
.
Racket’s evaluation model divides pretty much ev