Arc in Windows

Arc was released on 29^th January; just one day back; I started working with it in Windows. How to use our Arc in Windows; here is a quick way to start.

First thing first go to http://arclanguage.org/install and read the notes there carefully. It is a very small and well written guide how to get started in Arc. However for windows the first thing you have to do is to download and install MzScheme first. So here is the step by step guide to your Arc setup in Windows:

1. Download Arc.
2. Unzip Arc in a directory I use c:\Arc0.
3. Download MzScheme version 352(for Windows) from http://download.plt-scheme.org/mzscheme/ . You will land to the latest release download page which version 372. Click on the other version link and select V352 (as arclanguage.org suggests the use of v352; so please follow the canonical way.)
4. Once you have MzScheme installer run it. I have used C:\Program Files\MzScheme as installation directory you can use your own directory.
5. Go to your MzScheme directory and run the command Setup PLT.exe from the command prompt. Watch out for the line which says something like this:

setup-plt: Collection search path is

setup-plt: C:\[some-directories]\Application Data\PLT Scheme\352\collects

6. Go to this directory and check whether the path exits or not and properly populated. If not then create the required directories and sub directories and copy the collects folder from your MzScheme folder.
7. Everything should be ready by now do a cd to your Arc folder and run the following command:

mzscheme –m –f as.scm

That’s it start hacking Arc. If you have any problem feel free to post a comment will try to answer as fast as possible.