bug#21944: Error on ordering of define-record-type and define-public in a module is unhelpful - possible improvement?

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

On Mon 27 Jun 2016 10:02, Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> Apparently the reason this doesn't work in Guile right now is that the
> compiler currently reads and compiles one Scheme expression at a time,
> then stitches them together on the Tree-IL level.  Incidentally,
> `primitive-load' works in the same way for the interpreter: it reads and
> eval's single expressions in a loop.  We could change this to have Guile
> read the whole file and pass it all to the expander at once, within a
> `begin'.  This has some user-visible changes though:
>
>   * if evaluating an expression throws an error, primitive-load doesn't
>     read the following expressions and so doesn't detect syntax errors;
>     try a file like this:
>
>     (error "what")
>     )
>
>     With the interpreter (primitive-load) you will get the "what" error,
>     not a syntax error.  (Yes the unclosed paren hurts my eyeballs but I
>     wanted to demonstrate a syntax error.  Here's a matching paren:
>     ")".)
>
>   * Procedural macros won't be able to use bindings defined previously
>     in the file unless they are eval-whenned.  Of course this already
>     breaks in the compiler, but it succeeds in the interpreter.

Another user-visible change: changes to read-options would not take
effect in the same places.

Andy