21 May 2010 joolean   » (Journeyer)

Guile

The ever-resourceful wingo just completed a series of patches that enhances the abilities of Guile's syntax expander. Among other wonders, the semantics of the `@@' form have been extended to support arbitrary expressions. To wit:

(@@ (my-module) (my-expr))

...will evaluate -- but, more importantly, expand -- (my-expr) in (my-module)'s environment.

R6RS

I needed Andy's help with the above because, since last I wrote, I'd gotten pretty far with my implementation of the R6RS standard libraries for Guile. In fact, I'd pretty much finished with them -- all twenty-five or so of them (minus (rnrs bytevectors) and (rnrs io ports), which Ludovic Courtès had already taken on), plus unit tests. And I got them (mostly) done in about one grueling month. (Granted, a lot of them are just repackagings of existing Guile functionality, but...)

Maybe this is how things always go. I spent about a year working on R6RS support in Guile: I was on the Acela back to New York City from the 2009 FSF Associate Members meeting when I started playing around with a naive form of the library-to-module transformer that wingo merged to `master' a couple of weeks ago; and spent the next eight months variously getting frustrated, learning `syntax-case', tweaking, and rewriting, before I got the code to the point where I could knock out all those library implementations in one shot.

And now they'll be in Guile 2.0, which is better than I'd hoped, even.

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