Re: [Chicken-hackers] CR #1142 and upcoming changes

[Peter Bex]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2014 at 05:21:06PM +0200, Felix Winkelmann wrote:
> >  I would think that support for Chicken 2 & 3 should be dropped after a
> > Chicken 5 branch is made.
> 
> Yes, that sounds reasonable.

I didn't know we still supported CHICKEN 2 and 3.  In what way is that
done?  AFAIK the server-side component for "chicken-setup" is no longer
active.  Is it?

> > I had also implicitly assumed that the modularisation changes would help
> > bring full R7RS support to core.
> 
> I think it is R7RS support will be in an egg for the time being. Once
> we figure out the remaining issues, this should be usable in a rather
> seamless way.

Works for me.  I do think, however, that we should take a good look
at the r7rs library names, and probably adopt them wholesale, for the
parts that we implement.  This would make CHICKEN easier to use for
people using multiple Schemes, and for newbies coming from other Schemes.
It would also ease our burden at figuring out good names: half of the
stuff will suddenly *have* a good name.

Note that this does _not_ imply we should implement things that we
don't already have, just move the things we do have under the names
defined by R7RS.  If we have something that's close to R7RS but not
identical, we may decide to tweak it to match R7RS.  Except for
R7RS-style parameters ;)

> Finally, using more modules in core catches many errors related to
> wrong naming, or unintended cross-references between library units.
> 
> Oh, and should we ever want to have a fully "transparent" import that
> always does The Right Thing, then a cleaned up and more modularized
> core will be essential to that.
> 
> We really need to address the cruft that has accumulated over more
> than a decade...

"proper cleanups" are very dangerous.  However, if done right, they can
make life better.

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://www.more-magic.net