Re: home-directory in .kawarc.scm; kawa.init for SLIB; hash tables

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Doug Orleans <dougo@ccs.neu.edu> writes:

> Well, hm.  There's not much there.  I'm trying to port some code I
> wrote that uses lots of SLIB stuff that isn't in Kawa
> (e.g. 'common-list-functions), so I figured the answer was to install
> SLIB separately and make a kawa.init file.

One problem is performace:  We want Slib classes to be pre-compiled
to .class files.  That is easier with the Kawa slib setup. There
are also Kawa-specific changes that make sense:  type declarations,
declaring local names local, etc.

> Do you plan to add all of
> SLIB's packages to the Kawa distribution?

I'll add slib's packages as requested, and as people send me patches.
I.e. just try it out and if it needs a feature Kawa doesn't have or
the slib source needs to be patched, send me the patch for that.

A good chunk of slib are things that re builtin to Kawa, such as
macro expanders.  I'm not really sure there is much point in
wholesale import of slib.

> Even the "require" function that comes with Kawa isn't compatible
> with SLIB's-- it doesn't accept string arguments.

Neither does slib's judging from the manual and the code.  (I looked
at require:require, which just passes the feature to catalog:get,
which passes it to assq as is.)
-- 
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://www.bothner.com/~per/