whoa Taylor R Campbell 23 Sep 2009 18:49 UTC

I'm not keen on what has become the conventional mapping from library
to nested directory structures in implementations of the R6RS, or for
that matter with the R6RS's library system at all, but I have to say
I'm pretty astonished by the immensity of this SRFI.

I expected, perhaps, a sentence such as the following to explain the
entire specification, modulo details of term definitions:

`A Scheme system keeps a list of directory pathnames called its search
path, relative to which it looks in order for libraries' source code
by mapping their component names to file names, mapping alphanumerics
and hyphens to themselves, and mapping all other code points by
percent-encoding.'

Maybe there need to be a couple more sentences about an environment
variable storing the search path, putting version numbers before the
`.sls' suffix (which is silly enough as it is -- what was wrong with
`.scm', again?), and bumping the directory used to find a particular
library up to the front of the search path when finding its imports so
that it gets its neighbours if possible.

Anything more than that, I can't keep in my head when trying just to
write Scheme code!