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(guile.info)The Guile module system

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The Guile module system
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In 1996 Tom Lord implemented a full-featured module system for Guile
which allows loading Scheme source files into a private name space.

This module system is regarded as being rather idiosyncratic, and will
probably change to something more like the ML module system, so for now
I will simply describe how it works for a couple of simple cases.

First of all, the Guile module system sets up a hierarchical name space,
and that name space can be represented like Unix pathnames preceded by a
<#> character.  The root name space for all Guile-supplied modules is
called `ice-9'.

So for example, the SLIB interface, contained in
`$srcdir/ice-9/slib.scm', starts out with
     (define-module (ice-9 slib))
and a user program can use
     (use-modules (ice-9 slib))
to have access to all procedures and variables defined within the slib
module with `(define-public ...)'.

So here are the functions involved:

 - syntax: define-module module-specification
     MODULE-SPECIFICATION is of the form `(hierarchy file)'.  One
     example of this is
          (use-modules (ice-9 slib))
     define-module makes this module available to Guile programs under
     the given MODULE-SPECIFICATION.

 - syntax: define-public ...
     Makes a procedure or variable available to programs that use the
     current module.

 - syntax: use-modules module-specification
     MODULE-SPECIFICATION is of the form `(hierarchy file)'.  One
     example of this is
          (use-modules (ice-9 slib))
     use-modules allows the current Guile program to use all publicly
     defined procedures and variables in the module denoted by
     MODULE-SPECIFICATION.

[FIXME: must say more, and explain, and also demonstrate a private name
space use, and demonstrate how one would do Python's "from Tkinter
import *" versus "import Tkinter".  Must also add something about paths
and standards for contributed modules.]

 - primitive: standard-eval-closure module

Some modules are included in the Guile distribution; here are references
to the entries in this manual which describe them in more detail:
*boot-9*
     boot-9 is Guile's initialization module, and it is always loaded
     when Guile starts up.

*(ice-9 debug)*
     Mikael Djurfeldt's source-level debugging support for Guile (Note:
     Debugger User Interface).

*(ice-9 threads)*
     Guile's support for multi threaded execution (Note: Scheduling).

*(ice-9 slib)*
     This module contains hooks for using Aubrey Jaffer's portable
     Scheme library SLIB from Guile (Note: SLIB).

*(ice-9 jacal)*
     This module contains hooks for using Aubrey Jaffer's symbolic math
     packge Jacal from Guile (Note: JACAL).


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