Thank you for the comments. I agree especially with the part about RnRS needing to define a broad-ranging standard that allows writing useful libraries in a portable way. The lack of e.g. networking primitives is extremely limiting and this always greatly bothered me about RnRS.
I have questions about your point #4 though. On 21.07.2024 11:54, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen wrote: > Allowing numbers in library names makes certain syntactic extensions (as some > found in Chez Scheme) impossible. Do you have a pointer to some resource that explains this in more detail? It's the first time I'm hearing about it and would like to learn more. > In the syntax-case model of R6RS (which is also the basis of Guile's > expander), only identifiers like ":1" carry lexical information (a set of > marks and substitutions in the R6RS model), numbers and other Scheme datums > do not. I've always thought of library names as data, not identifiers... In R7RS, both 'define-library' and 'import' kind of exist "outside" the rest of the language, in a sense, and treat library names as literals. - 'define-library' must be the outermost form read from a file/stream/whatever, and neither the library name being defined nor any of the library names in 'import' sub-forms are subject to variable lookup or any such mechanisms that otherwise affect Scheme program evaluation; the library names are all treated literally, like data. - 'import' (when not used a 'define-library' subform) must appear one or more times at the start of a sequence of forms read from a file/stream/whatever that describes a program, and the library name operands are again not subject to variable lookup or such, but rather treated literally as if data. - The only other entity in R7RS that deals with library names, if I remember correctly, is the 'environment' procedure, which expects library names in the form of data (lists). In what kind of situation might a library name be made up of identifiers (syntax objects) that might need to carry lexical information? Cheers, - Taylan
