PLT is happy to announce the release of Racket, available from
http://racket-lang.org/
With Racket, you can script command shells and web servers; you can
quickly prototype animations and complex GUIs; regexps and threads are
here to serve you. To organize your systems, you can mix and match
classes, modules or components. Best of all, you start without writing
down types. If you later wish to turn your script into a program, equip
your Racket modules with explicit type declarations as you wish. And
Racket doesn't just come as a typed variant; you can also write your
modules in a purely functional and lazy dialect.
Racket comes in so many flavors because Racket is much more than a
standard scripting language or a plain programming language. Racket
supports language extensibility to an unequaled degree. A Racket
programmer knows that making up a new language is as easy as writing a
new library.
To help you start quickly, Racket includes batteries in all shapes and
sizes, most importantly, extensive documentation and all kinds of
libraries.
Racket occupies a unique position between research and practice. It
inherits many major ideas from language research, among them type safety
(when the type system says that x is a number, then at runtime it always
is a number) and memory safety (when some memory is reclaimed by the
garbage collector it is impossible to still have a reference to it). At
the same time, user demand governs rigid adherence to purely theoretical
principles.
Racket, formerly PLT Scheme, is a product of over 15 years of
development. Although Racket starts with a mature software base and an
established user community, its new name reflects our view that this is
just the beginning of Racket's evolution.
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