Programming Praxis

In the previous exercise, I needed a function to display a floating-point number to a single decimal place. Standard Scheme doesn’t provide such a function, so I wrote one; it was simple enough.

But as I thought about it, I was annoyed that Standard Scheme doesn’t provide a proper rounding function; Standard Scheme does provide a round function, but it returns the nearest integer to its argument and doesn’t permit a parameter that specifies the number of digits after the decimal place. So I wrote such a function; it is shown on the next page.

But the point of today’s exercise isn’t to write a rounding function for Scheme. Every computing environment does something annoying; for instance, I just spent two minutes and wrote down 17 things about Standard Scheme that annoy me (no, I won’t share), then I spent another minute and wrote down 7 things that annoy me about WordPress (inability to edit comments is top of that list). The point is for you to seize control of your computing environment and fix something that annoys you.

So your task today is to find something about your computing environment that annoys you and fix it. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run how I fixed what annoyed me, or to discuss your fix to what annoyed you in the comments below.

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