Re: [PATCH] Add ".guile.sls" and ".sls" to the default %load-extensions

[Alex Shinn <alexshinn@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 5:28 AM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:
>
>> One option would be to return to Aubrey Jaffer's model (used in SCM),
>> where a catalog of modules and their locations is maintained
>
> Hmm, I never really liked that.  And it’s quite an uncommon model.
>
>>> (I’m not sure if searching for a file name with no extension is
>>> intentional.  Ideas?)
>>
>> I looked into this.  Guile has searched for file names with no extension
>> since its initial import into VCS in 1996 (0f2d19dd).  Initially, names
>> with no extension were searched _before_ *.scm, and this logic was
>> hard-coded into the search procedure (try-module-autoload in
>> boot-9.scm).  Jim Blandy introduced the '%load-extensions' variable with
>> default value ("" ".scm") later in 1996 (26544b96), and Mikael Djurfeldt
>> reversed the order to (".scm" "") in 1999 (0a74e31d).  It has been that
>> way ever since.
>
> Woow, thanks for digging it up.  Now we should find out what these guys
> had in mind *before* Guile was first put under version control.  ;-)
>
> Anyway, I still don’t know what to do with .sls.  But the fact that R7
> may come up with its own extension makes me think that maybe we should
> just forget about that extension, as everyone will eventually do.   Hmm?

FYI, there is currently no convention, and the design of
Snow (the library sharing network) does not require any
specific extension (you create and work with packages
which are self-describing via meta-info).

However, for third-party tools it may be convenient to
have a common convention.  Currently Chibi uses .sld
(Scheme Library Definition) to distinguish from R6RS.
These can inline the entire library definition, or use
include files (again, since you specify the filename any
extension will do, and Chibi uses the traditional .scm).

-- 
Alex