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Module­Syntax

alexshinn
2010-06-20 17:09:04
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ModuleSyntax

Whatever implementation strategy is used, a syntax for the standard module form must be chosen. Modulo keyword names, options include:

(module <declarations ...) <body> ...

Seen in most other programming languages, the module form is just a single declaration, and the rest of the file contains the actual code. This has the distinct disadvantage that it can't be implemented easily in many strategies, or on top of existing module systems. Guile and Gauche use this syntax, although Gauche allows including the body inside the module form.

(module <declarations> ... <body> ...)

Used in the R6RS proposal and many Scheme implementations, this is simple but opens questions of whether declarations may be expanded from macros, and if so makes any static analysis of the module impossible without expanding the body. Sometimes disliked because it requires indenting the body of the module.

(module (<declarations> ...) <body> ...)

This avoids the issues above, simply by delimiting the declarations with a pair of parentheses so they are all known in advance. If they are static (can't be expanded from macros), then a simple rule of allowing and ignoring any unknown declaration keyword allows for easy forward-compatibility and implementation-specific extensions.

(module <declarations> ...)

The module form only allows declarations - any code needs to be specified with declarations such as (include <file>) or (body <code> ...). This is the syntax used in Scheme48 and Chibi-Scheme. It is equivalent in expressiveness to the delimited wrapper approach, trading an additional level of indentation for no extra parens around the declarations.

(module <declarations> ... ---- <body> ...)

where ---- is some arbitrary symbol chosen to act as a delimiter between the declarations and the body of the library. Otherwise the same as above, the shortcut syntax allows the body to have only one level of indentation instead of two.

In addition, with all of these syntaxes, some declarations that are frequently used may get fixed positions. The name of the module is almost universally the first argument after the module keyword. In some systems, such as Chez and Chicken, the exports list is given as the second positional argument.

One frequent debate with respect to syntax is whether to keep the module declaration and source in one file or to split them across separate files. However, whichever module system is used this largely boils down to user preference. The syntaxes which include an implicit body suggest a single file, but so long as an (include <file>) or similar form is provided, any such system can move the body to a separate file. From the other side, syntaxes with no <body> suggest an include is required, but all such systems provide a way to inline the body in the module declaration (begin in Scheme48 and body in Chibi). So this preference shouldn't affect your choice of syntax.