Re: What are the long-term goals for R7RS in Chicken?

[Lassi Kortela]

> Note that include-files and loaded libraries are two different things,
> also in CHICKEN, libraries are usually compiled, so the .sld convention
> is only partially useful.

The convention (observed at least by Chibi, Gambit, and Gauche) is that 
each .sld file contains one define-library form.

Gambit can compile something like hello.sld:

(define-library (hello)
  (import (scheme base))
  (begin (write-string "Hello world\n")))

into an object file hello.o1 via "gsc hello.sld". The gsi interpreter 
can load either the original hello.sld or the compiled hello.o1. (I'm 
not sure why it appends a running number to the ".o" suffix.) The same 
arrangement would probably work for Chicken.

The code to implement simple libraries is often written directly into 
the .sld file itself. Complex libraries tend to have the implementation 
parcelled out into one or more separate .scm files, which are (include 
"...") from the .sld file. Non-portable files may be included via 
cond-expand.

(include "...") must always specify the file name extension of the file 
being included, though in practice that tends to always be ".scm". The 
file foo/bar.sld files is imported via (import (foo bar)) and the import 
never specifies the file name extension; ".sld" is implied, though 
something else could be used as well; R6RS tends to use ".sls".

IMHO Gambit's R7RS support is simple, works well, and would probably be 
a reasonable model for Chicken.