Re: Towards De-icing ice-9 modules.

[Panicz Maciej Godek]

2016-02-12 21:41 GMT+01:00 Chad Albers <address@hidden>:

Hi,

In my attempt to assist the guile project, I thought I would share a document on a plan to migrate some of the ice-9 modules into a more intuitive, yet to be decided, namespace.  Before I proposed a technological plan, I have begun really an audit of what ice-9 modules are available (and undocumented), and other modules that guile ships with. (there are some secrets down there).

Hi,

maybe I'm on a bit conservative side, but as far as I can tell, there is a recurring suggestion is to rename modules called (ice-9 xxx) as (guile xxx).

While I do agree that the "ice-9" name isn't particularly intuitive, it does provide a metaphor that grasps the idea that inspired Guile.

Beside this little difference -- that "ice-9" might be slightly unobvious to newcommers -- I see no cognitive advantage in that renaming, while there is a huge disadvantage of breaking backwards compatibility of many programs that use Guile.

If the modification was to be meaningful, we should group modules into logical categories -- for example, rename (ice-9 and-let-star) to (syntax and-let*),  (ice-9 threads) to (control threads) and (ice-9 readline) to (utils readline), for instance.

What I think would be a cooler idea is to provide a mechanism for automatically fetching the required modules (in their required versions) from specified git repositories, so that once a program is written, one wouldn't have to worry about its dependecies.

It would also be nice to have a tool that would be able to trace the modifications in the source code to see whether it contains any changes that could break the existing functionality compared to some earler version.

(this would probably be difficult to do in general, but perhaps there are some common use cases that could be easily covered)

Best regards,

Panicz