[r6rs-discuss] on rational 6.7 Compund library names

From: Anton van Straaten <anton>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:25:17 -0400

Thomas Lord wrote:
> This design decision rebels against industry best practices, for no good
> reason.

Which best practices are you referring to? The reason I ask is that it
sounds as though you're suggesting using URIs as library names in the
source code of programs, but most languages don't do that.

Particularly in the case of Scheme, there are real benefits to having
library names be easily readable by Scheme programs, without requiring
that those programs parse what amounts to a foreign serialization format.

Note that the 5.91 draft did specify library names as URIs, but
objections were raised about this, which the editors "became convinced
by." It might be worth reviewing the list archives to see some of those
objections, to avoid unnecessary repetition.

That's not to say that there aren't some valid issues here that are not
addressed by R6RS. However, many of those issues are really outside the
scope of the normative part of R6RS. Note that the non-normative
appendices include some recommendations about mapping of library names
to resources, although they are not comprehensive.

Anton
Received on Tue Jun 26 2007 - 14:25:17 UTC