Snow was designed to be a portable module system that could be used on many implementations of Scheme **now**, hence the name (Scheme Now! or Snow).
Because of its primary goal to be portable to many implementations of Scheme, it avoided relying or exposing features that were not common to many implementations. One of those features is the REPL. Although many implementations have a REPL, they have sufficient incompatibilities that a strictly static linking model was used (i.e. a program declares which packages it requires, and they declare which packages they require, and so on, so the transitive closure is the set of packages that must be loaded).
As for documentation, did you check the Snow web site?
The Snow project is fairly dormant right now. I was hoping it would catch on with users, but after a short while it was clear that it would take a lot of work to convince people to contribute to Snow and make it evolve.
Marc
On 2-Mar-09, at 3:25 PM, Paul Onions wrote:
On 2009-03-02 12:44:41 +0000, Adrien Piérard <pierarda@iro.umontreal.ca
said:
You don't run snow in gambit, it's the converse.
You write your package with portable R4RS code and snow code (package* foo) and so on. Then, you run "snow ./package.scm" and you're done. Feel like eating worms? "SNOW_HOST=csi ./package.scm". And so on.
Ahh, now I begin to see the "big picture", thanks.
So Snow can be thought of as an implementation of Scheme that incorporates a package system but uses another pre-existing Scheme implementation to provide it's basic language functionality. You can right toplevel programs and scripts in Snow, but you do not have access to a REPL. It sits atop the pre-existing Scheme like an application -- it doesn't integrate into it.
Was it developed with some specific kind of applications in mind? Or was it perhaps a test vehicle to develop the packaging system? I can't quite understand its "raison d'etre". Does it have much of a userbase?
Thanks, Paul
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