Tony Garnock-Jones wrote:
> "Source code in files. How quaint. How 70's." (Kent Beck)

If prefer, replace "file" with "something that has a URI".

> Scheme code doesn't have to live anywhere in particular - it can be
> sourced from anywhere, from files, from stdin, from an email message,
> from a database - the only constraint on scheme code is that it is an
> S-expression.

Right, but we're talking about "named libraries".  Once something has
a name, you can give it a URI.

If you have multiple named resources A, B, and C nested within a
resource X, then we have standard way of naming them: X/A, X/B, and X/C.
This all works best if A, B, and C are separate "units of characters",
rather than being concatenated together.

> List syntax is already suitable for sequencing S-expressions within an
> S-expression. Files provide a second-class means of sequencing
> S-expressions. Recovering a complete list of S-expressions from a file
> requires some small-but-nonzero amount of work.

Beside the point: a collection of libraries is not a "sequence": It is
a *mapping*, from names to libraries.

> A file is not always the best granularity for a library

True, but we're trying to standardize a useful portable basic feature.

> - sometimes many
> small libraries are best expressed in a single file,

I think this is fairly rare, and not a very important use case.
If they're small, why should they be separate libraries?

 > and sometimes a
> single library is best expressed in multiple files.

Right, though this not directly handled by the proposal.  It can
be handled by using a compound library importing and re-exporting
smaller libraries.

> The scoping of the |library| form can be unclear if forms /following/
> the declaration are to be considered part of the library:
>
>   (library "mylib" "scheme://r6rs")
>   (define library (compose write list))
>   (library "otherlib" "scheme://r6rs")
>   (define number 17)

The proposal doesn't support nested library forms, so I don't see
why this is relevant.
--
	--Per Bothner
xxxxxx@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/