Re: [Chicken-users] Conflict between simple-macros and other extensions?

[Thomas Chust]

Am 04.10.2005, 14:19 Uhr, schrieb Graham Fawcett  
<address@hidden>:

> [...]
> You know, Felix -- it would be great to have a single, well-written,
> side-by-side comparison of '(use require-extension require-module
> import load ...) somewhere. I respect that there must be valid reasons
> for having all of these directives. Though the application developer
> in me cries out "just give me one directive that Does The Right Thing
> in any context!", I'm willing to pat the AD-in-me on the head and
> console him if there's a good rationale for maintaining this rather
> large suite of inclusion/linkage directives.
> [...]

Hello,

in most cases the "require-extension" also known as "use" directive is  
just the "Do The Right Thing" directive that you want.

But to have a comparison, the constructs I know of are
        syntax: require-extension, use
                * automatically decide to load source, shared object or library
                * automatically decide whether it isn't already loaded
                * automatically decide whether to load at compile or runtime
        procedure: require
                * automatically decide to load source, shared object or library
                * automatically decide whether it isn't already loaded
                * always load at runtime
        procedure: require-for-syntax
                * automatically decide to load source, shared object or library
                * automatically decide whether it isn't already loaded
                * always load at compile-time (unless interpreted)
        procedure: load
                * always load source or shared object
                * always load it, no check whether it's already present
                * always load at runtime
        load-library:
                * always load library (internally or from shared object)
                * always load it, no check whether it's already present
                * always load at runtime

I hope I have put it as simply as possible while still being correct...  
These are only the procedures that concern themselves with *loading* of  
code, though. In addition there are at least two module systems available  
for CHICKEN: The one that comes with the syntax-case egg and the one that  
you were using, which comes with the simple-macros egg. These systems have  
their own semantics to *import* code and to *separate namespaces*. I  
cannot give a good overview over their usage, though, because I never  
seriously used them so far.

cu,
Thomas