Hi Guilers, Just wanted to give an update on the status of the library system I've been working on:
* As per the discussion above, my implementation uses an implicit phasing approach (i.e., it doesn't do multiple instantiation) along with `(ice-9 syncase)' to handle expand-time evaluation -- specifically, by way of evaluation environments based on on-the-fly creation of custom module interfaces. I wasn't able to find Abdulaziz's ACM paper, but his "formal comment" on the subject of R6RS phasing [1] was informative. (In fact, a lot of the formal comments were handy: [2].) I haven't yet delved into how severe the breakage is where there are differences between Guile's `syntax-case' and R6RS's, but I'm hoping it's, you know, mild. * Given the above, my current implementation is hovering at about 200 lines, whereas the current reference implementations, because they don't presume an existing macro or module system, are several orders of magnitude larger. Thanks are due to Tom Lord (and everyone else who designed Guile's module / interface system) for making this possible, if not downright easy. * At the moment, R6RS libraries can "import" Guile modules directly, but the reverse is not true, partly because I can't figure out a good way to map version information onto the filesystem in a way that Guile's module system can understand. My initial thought was to do it such that a library's version would map to its module name, a la: (library (foo bar baz (6)) would live in /foo/bar/6/baz.scm ...but Guile doesn't like numbers in the module name. Right now I'm trying to think of way to do a transformation on a library expression such that multiple versions of the same library could live in the same Guile module and be accessed individually by some kind of manifest at "use" time, but I can't figure out what that module name and the extra, associated API should look like. * It would be cool if the module system had hooks of some sort to allow it to receive hints about locating modules. * The "party balloons" example from the R6Rs is working, at least intermittently. The "quotient-and-remainder" example is almost there. Regards, Julian [1] - http://www.r6rs.org/formal-comments/comment-123.txt [2] - http://www.r6rs.org/formal-comments/comment-92.txt
