Re: [Scheme-reports] "module" vs. "library"

[Eli Barzilay <eli@x>]

6 hours ago, Andy Wingo wrote:
> On Tue 05 Jul 2011 16:19, Alex Shinn <alexshinn@x> writes:
> 
> > The rationale is that we want room for future extensions -
> > e.g. the ability to have an import-lazy declaration (i.e. autoload),
> > or first-class interfaces and units, or versioned libraries, etc.
> 
> Unless I misunderstand, Ghuloum & Dybvig's implicit phasing
> effectively provides for autoloads, without having autoloads
> mentioned explicitly anywhere in the spec.

It's not really what you'd consider autoloads.  The problem is that if
you don't mention any binding of a library that you require, then
there is no way to know which phase it should be instantiated at -- so
it's only instantiated when such a binding is encountered.  It might
be possible to turn this into a kind of an autoload thing if you hack
some macro that mentions an identifier from a library only when a
function is used.  But the price for that is that you can't really
have libraries that are imported only for their side-effects.  (And
there's also the obvious price of implicit phases, which some consider
a benefit and some consider a bug.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!

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