Re: A liitle note on the side

[Alex Shinn <foof@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At Wed, 23 Jun 2004 17:14:21 -0700, Bradd W. Szonye wrote:
> 
> No, it isn't. Which Schemes already implement REQUIRE-EXTENSION? Any of
> them? Please, quit trying to pass off a brand new name as "common
> practice." Extensions that require name changes or new aliases are not
> "common practice."

The concept is common practice, and supporting the SRFI can be done
with a small macro in any Scheme that already supports require.

For those keeping score:

  12 schemes directly support the equivalent of require (chez,
  chicken, elk, gauche, guile, kawa, ksm, llava, mzscheme,
  pocketscheme, scm, stklos)

  2 schemes use an "include" form similar to require, possibly not
  handling multiple invocations correctly (gambit, stalin)

  6 schemes don't seem to have anything more than load (inlab-scheme,
  jaja, jscheme, larceny, oaklisp, mit-scheme)

  Bigloo puts all module info in a (module ...) form, but assumes the
  rest of the code in the file is part of the module, so it may be
  able to support require.

  Rscheme does not use a require-like approach, but could support it.

  Scheme48 is incompatible with require.

> > Now, it seems that some people take this as an opportunity to make big
> > statements about million line programs and the dangers to the future
> > of Scheme. This is ridiculuous.
> 
> They're pointing out that your proposal doesn't actually solve anything,
> and that it's incompatible with some systems' requirements. That makes
> it technically inferior to existing solutions like SRFI-7. Why bother?

I thought the "million line programs" discussion was useful.  Anything
that big clearly needs dynamic-require, a superset of require.  It
seems the Scheme48 module system is the one that needs to prove itself
here.

-- 
Alex