Am 05.07.2011 06:06, schrieb John Cowan: > Andre van Tonder scripsit: > >> Unit, component, package, structure, assembly, collection, container, >> aggregation, grouping. > > Unit, component, package, struct(ure) are used in Schemes/Lisps in other > ways. Collection and container suggest runtime objects. Assembly is > heavily overloaded, but might have been good if the CLR hadn't used it. > Aggregation suggests an accidental rather than intentional combination. > Namespace (which you didn't mention) is already in use. > > But keep going. What about "define-library"? It might be slightly confusing as it sounds a bit procedural for a purely syntactic construct, but it does not seem to clash with any existing implementation (as far as a quick Google search reveals, at least) and preserves the "library" term, which is common, well-known, clear and in line with previous Scheme specs (R6RS and, in a way, R5RS' usage of the term "library procedure"). Having said that, I don't find "extensibility" to be a particularly good argument for the design of a standard module system. In fact, I actually even find it to be quite harmful. The whole point of a standard module system for Scheme is portability: to be able to share code among Scheme implementations in a structured way. As such, it should stay fairly static and only rarely be changed or added to, if ever. Making the module form extensible, on the other hand, opens the door to possibly incompatible implementation-specific extensions which potentially decrease the portability of what is actually mainly thought as a portability construct; not because these extensions make portable code less portable, but because it encourages programmers to narrow the portability of their code to a subset of the Scheme landscape for mere convenience. To be honest, I actually think that the restricted R6RS library form is actually the right approach it that it actively *prevents* anybody from substantially adding to it, which essentially guarantees that it will work mostly the same on all implementations implementing it - but YMMV, naturally. (And as to the possible extensions that Alex listed: AFAIK, R6RS libraries at least support versioning, and lazy loading might be doable as an extension to the "import" form.) Sorry if some of my comments are uninformed at points. Regards, Denis Washington _______________________________________________ Scheme-reports mailing list Scheme-reports@scheme-reports.org http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports
