Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] Move around {rename, delete}-file and a question about module for inexact

[John Cowan]

On Sun, Sep 10, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Peter Bex <address@hidden> wrote:

This same inconsistency crops up in (scheme lazy), which has
delay, delay-force, force, promise? and make-promise, whereas
the scheme module has delay and force.

As the main inventor of the R7RS-small modules, I would advise not getting hung up on them.  They exist primarily to make things optional for truly small R7RS-small implementations.  For example, the R5RS numeric tower makes inexact numbers optional, even though only subminimal and blatantly non-confirming Schemes (SigScheme, Mini-Scheme, Oaklisp, Owl Lisp in my test suite) actually omit them.  

So in practice (scheme inexact) could have been folded into (scheme base).  It isn't, because R7RS-small is not entirely about practice, but also about extending downward the range of what counts as a conformant Scheme, say one that compiles code to run on a microcontroller with no hardware floating point.  (Similarly with the (scheme case-lambda) module, which is there because Alex Shinn, who hates the case-lambda macro, insisted on it.)

Again, we could put delay-force, promise? and make-promise into
(chicken base) _and_ make an aliasing module (chicken lazy)
that has both the extended and r5rs procedures, but that seems
awkward and annoying when you import both; you'd get constant
warnings about re-importing identifiers.

I would not expect a warning about importing the same binding of an identifier through more than one path: if you define a module foo that re-exports identifiers from the base module, and then write bar importing both the base module and foo, you should not (and do not, in Chicken or Chibi) get a warning.

 

OTOH, putting it just
under (chicken base) might result in the aforementioned confusion
for people familiar with r7rs.

I at least would expect (chicken base) to be a base module incorporating at least the intersection of (scheme base) and (scheme r5rs), given that Chicken is R5RS-based.  Most people add an import when they get (or know they will get) an undefined-variable error, and Chibi's advanced REPL ("chibi-scheme -R") will helpfully search the library for a module that defines such a variable.

Tl;dr:  merge these small modules into (chicken base).

-- 

John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        address@hidden

Principles.  You can't say A is made of B or vice versa.

All mass is interaction.  --Richard Feynman