Re: Module system: A compromise idea.

[Dirk Herrmann]

Sorry for the typos below...

On Tue, 19 Dec 2000, Dirk Herrmann wrote:

> For example, we could provide module-ref/from as a C level primitive that
> does binding of non-macro objects lazily, i. e. whenver the code is
> executed, the binding at that time will be read from the corresponding
> module.  Thus, intermediate changes to the module will become visible when
> the code is executed afterwards.  For compilation, module-ref/from will be
> bound to a module such that it can be handled by Dybvig's transformers.
             ^ this should be "macro", not "module"
> During compilation, we don't have to care about dynamic changes.  Since
> people will use compilation only for those parts of the code which they
> consider finished, changes to such code will be comparably rare and it
> will be acceptable if those parts have to be recompiled whenever something
> changes.
> 
> A general problem is how to deal with changes to macros in the interactive
> case.  However, this is a problem that is not specific to whether we
> are using Dybvig's system or not.  Changes to macros require to
> re-transform those expressions that had been using the old version of the
                                               ^ insert "transformed" here
> macro.  But, this is (I assume) a less frequent case than just the
> changing of other bindings.

Best regards,
Dirk Herrmann