[gambit-list] Using Snow from Gambit?

Marc Feeley feeley at iro.umontreal.ca
Mon Mar 2 16:07:39 EST 2009


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 at 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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