Re: What's the status of modules and macros?

[Rob Browning]

Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

> Yes, the syntax-case transformer knows all of Scheme and keeps a
> `compile-time environment' when it traverses the code so that it knows
> what identifiers are bound where.  Consequently, it can identify
> references to top-level variables inside `syntax' forms.

OK, so the only things it doesn't really know about, I guess, are
define-macros, and/or some of the other types of macros (eval-case,
etc).  It seems to leave those alone.

Other than that, given your description above, I can see why you
suggested that syntax-case might a good starting point when dealing
with compilation.

<aside>

  Also, I hope I'm not opening up a whole can of worms here, but
  what's the deal with psyntax.ss -- I saw a discussion about it
  perhaps having to have "special" handling wrt edits, etc., and I
  also saw the observation that since it's now part of Guile and
  presumably we have copyright assignment, we should be able to do
  what we want with it (not that we should be obnoxious or
  anything...)  I also saw the observation that our ChangeLog might
  satisfy whatever change documentation constrants there are might be
  valid.  It *would* be a little cleaner if we could just have a
  normal .scm file in place of .ss.

  I'm just asking because the current setup seems somewhat awkward,
  and if I'm going to be playing around there, I wanted to know what
  "rules" apply to editing where those files are concerned so I don't
  DTWT.

  (No big deal, though.  For the most part I'm just curious.)

</aside>

> I just realized that we don't need to specially tag gloc pointers when
> they point to variables since variables can be identified already on
> their own (while vcells can't).  That would significantly cleanup the
> gloc/struct tag clash magic (which is something that you probably
> don't want to know about) since we can use the gloc tag for structs
> exlcusively then.

OK.  I think I grok all that more or less.

> That would be akin to finding a strategy to making defmacros
> transparently hygienic.  If there would be such a thing, we wouldn't
> have syntax-case et al, I think.

Right.  I realized that when I went off to think for a bit :>

-- 
Rob Browning <address@hidden> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930