[r6rs-discuss] hello.0.4.2.sls vs. hello-0.4.2.sls

From: Thomas Lord <lord>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:29:25 -0700

Anton van Straaten wrote:
> It is expected that implementations will offer alternative, more
> powerful mapping mechanisms, but those are not likely to be common
> between R6RS implementations.
>


That is unfortunate.

The problem of mapping logical names of libraries to native file names
(or other database keys) is, of course, not something to standardize.

Still, we could recognize that in any given execution environment an
implementation has to, in effect, be able to produce a list of the
internally defined names of all installed libraries and provide some
simple way to access whatever file or database entry contains each
library, given only that internally defined name.

If that were a reflective capability then there could be multiple,
alternative approaches: portable modules around for mapping from
library names in imports to the presumably intended sources.

In other words, schemer's would be much closer to writing software
configuration management tools in portable scheme, rather than
having wind up with very screwy, ad-hoc, fragile tools such as in
Perl (sorry, Perl).

-t
Received on Thu Jun 28 2007 - 18:29:25 UTC