The Racket Programming Language

Published on 08 April 2018 (Updated: 19 October 2024)

Welcome to the Racket page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

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Description

Well, at this point, Wikipedia has yet to fail me. As usual, I referenced it to learn a little bit more about today's language.

Like Python and Java, Racket is a general-purpose programming language. Unfortunately, that's sort of where the similarities stop. After all, Racket comes from the Lisp-Scheme family, so it resembles a typical functional programming language. In other words, expect plenty of parentheses.

What makes Racket different from its Lisp counterparts is its extensibility. In other words, the language can be easily modified using macros. Remember when we learned about macros in Rust? Same idea. We can use these macros to control the syntax of Racket.

Macros alone aren't interesting enough to warrant any excitement. However, mix macros with a module system, and we get an extremely versatile language. These modules allow us to import various macros that can be used to control the dialect of Racket. For instance, if we wanted a statically typed version of Racket, there's a module for that: typed/racket.

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