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Re: a simple counter-proposal

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 55 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 55 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



campbell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, felix wrote:


Yes, so what prevents `require-extension' to be such a disjoint config-language
form? If I understand correctly merely requiring that `require-extension' should
be the first form in the program text (directly, not as an expansion of another
macro) would make it compatible with Scheme48, right?


Yes, although I don't understand why you'd want to so dramatically
move away from SRFI 7 when it is such a trivial amendment to SRFI 7,
SRFI 7 provides much more quite useful functionality anyway, and SRFI 7
permits extension considerably more easily: the PROGRAM form is a quite
general form, whereas REQUIRE-EXTENSION has only one purpose, to
declare a dependency on a feature.


The fact that `require-extension' serves a single purpose is clear and
fully intended. It also appears to me more natural and straightforward
than shoehorning SRFI-7 into a more usable form.

If you think SRFI-7 should be amended and/or extended, I would find it
very reasonable to do so. Yet, I think SRFI-55 expresses the notion
of "loading/linking whatever this implementation needs to support SRFI X"
in a clearer way.
It might also be a good idea to recommend putting any `require-extension'
forms at the top of a source-file, preceding any other top-level forms,
which in the end would make it even compatible (in whatever way, I don't
know much about S48's implementation) with Schemes that separate the
configuration language from the actual code.


cheers,
felix