23.1 More Rackets

► |  | The Racket Guide

1 | Welcome to Racket
2 | Racket Essentials
3 | Built-In Datatypes
4 | Expressions and Definitions
5 | Programmer-Defined Datatypes
6 | Modules
7 | Contracts
8 | Input and Output
9 | Regular Expressions
10 | Exceptions and Control
11 | Iterations and Comprehensions
12 | Pattern Matching
13 | Classes and Objects
14 | Units
15 | Reflection and Dynamic Evaluation
16 | Macros
17 | Creating Languages
18 | Concurrency and Synchronization
19 | Performance
20 | Parallelism
21 | Running and Creating Executables
22 | More Libraries
23 | Dialects of Racket and Scheme
24 | Command-Line Tools and Your Editor of Choice
| Bibliography
| Index

▼ | 23 | Dialects of Racket and Scheme

23.1 | More Rackets
23.2 | Standards
23.3 | Teaching

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### 23.1 More Rackets🔗ℹ

“Racket” is more of an idea about programming languages than a language in the usual sense. Macros can extend a base language (as described in Macros), and alternate parsers can construct an entirely new language from the ground up (as described in Creating Languages).

The #lang line that starts a Racket module declares the base language of the module. By “Racket,” we usually mean #lang followed by the base language racket or racket/base (of which racket is an extension). The Racket distribution provides additional languages, including the following:

- typed/racket — like racket, but statically typed; see the Typed Racket Guide documentation.

- lazy — like racket/base, but avoids evaluating an expression until its value is needed; see the Lazy Racket documentation.

- frtime — changes evaluation in an even more radical way to support reactive programming; see the FrTime documentation.

- scribble/base — a language, which looks more like Latex than Racket, for writing documentation; see Scribble: The Racket Documentation Tool

Each of these languages is used by starting module with the language name after #lang. For example, this source of this document starts with #lang scribble/base.

Furthermore, Racket users can define their own languages, as discussed in Creating Languages. Typically, a language name maps to its implementation through a module path by adding /lang/reader; for example, the language name scribble/base is expanded to scribble/base/lang/reader, which is the module that implements the surface-syntax parser. Some language names act as language loaders; for example, #lang planet planet-path downloads, installs, and uses a language via PLaneT.

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