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On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Per Bothner wrote: > Finding modules. How does an implementation or a user resolve > a module name to a module definition? I just wanted to quote this question, because answering it is VERY IMPORTANT. There needs to be some standard way for a scheme to resolve modules. Technically this is outside the scope of the language, so we *could* leave it to SRFI's or something - but as a practical matter, a statement that some library is needed is flatly useless if there is no standard way for the build environment to take that statement and find the code associated with that library. In the C world, there is the idea of an "include directory" for <headers of> library code, and part of configuring a build environment is telling it where the include directory/ies is/are (such as by setting an environment variable or a registry value or a line in a configuration file). In fact, in most build environments there is more than one such directory, and there's a configurable order in which they are searched to resolve a named resource. I'm not going to put a stick in the ground and ask for this system to be copied verbatim with its assumptions about files and file/module mappings, but let's be at least that useful. There ought to be a repository for scheme library code on the system somewhere (database, network resource, directory, whatever) that we can direct any scheme environment to use, and scheme environments must be scrupulous about not modifying that code nor requiring it to be modified in any way that might interfere with the operation of other scheme environments. In other words, if we have a useful standard here, then the same set of libraries ought to be available in my guile and in my chicken and in my gambit environments, and with different configuration, another user on the same system could point all three to a different common set of libraries. In order for library sharing to be meaningful, the scheme implementations must not presume that they have the right to modify these libraries or require implementation-specific forms in them, because then other implementations which are also using them will break. I must say that I greatly prefer files and directories to databases or network-based repositories for my own use, because that means there is less infrastructure that must be working properly for the scheme environments to work. And in principle, the best programming system is the one that can be used with little or no infrastructure, because it's what you use to *build* infrastructure. Also, the tools available on most systems exclusive of the scheme implementation itself are already capable of working properly with files; The command line knows how to glob filenames, and ls and grep and diff and cat and append are my friends, for example; analogous utilities for the inspection, comparison, modification, and location of database or network code outside the scheme systems are as yet far less simple or useful. Bear