Re: Fmt Module

[Andreas Rottmann]

Noah Lavine <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello all,
>
> I just completed packaging Alex Shinn's fmt library for Guile, and I'd
> like us to include it in the trunk. The library's home page (with
> documentation!) is http://synthcode.com/scheme/fmt/.
>
Not that I have any say in that, but IMHO, it would be preferable to
keep external libraries maintained separatly from the Guile core;
however in this case, including it in the core might be justified by its
proposed use in the JIT compiler.

FWIW, there's already an R6RS adaption of "fmt"[1] as part of the Wak
project[0], which works nicely with Guile (from the stable-2.0 branch).

[0] http://home.gna.org/wak/
[1] http://gitorious.org/wak/wak-fmt

> It looks like a nice formatting library,
>
Indeed!

> and I imagine it would be useful to people who want to generate html
> for the web module.
>
For that, I'd rather suggest building up SXML and use SSAX[2] or
HtmlPrag[3] for serialization.

[2] http://ssax.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://www.neilvandyke.org/htmlprag/

> However, the real reason I want it in is because it has the ability to
> format C source code nicely, and all of the plans for the JIT complier
> involve automatically generating a lot of C.
>
Yeah, that makes sense.

> (I'm only attaching the basic library right now, but I hope to package
> up the C formatting stuff soon.)
>
Well, the Wak adaption has this stuff already done ;-).

> The files are all attached. To use the library, put all of the files
> in a folder, open Guile in that folder, do (load "fmt-guile.scm"), and
> then (use-modules (fmt fmt)). If you want to test the library, do
> (load "test-fmt.scm"). It passes all tests on my machine.
>
Having a quick glance at the code, I think you should refrain from using
`load', and use `include' instead (it seems that the latter is
undocumented, unfortunatly).  Also, it should not be necessary to `load'
any file before doing `(use-modules (fmt fmt))' -- the latter should be
enough if the code is organized appropriatly (i.e. files placed into the
right directories).  You might want to have a look at how the R6RS port
is organized (see the git repo at [1]).

> fmt-guile.scm is a new file, but the other ones are almost identical
> to the upstream version. I'm going to try to get the changes merged so
> it will be easy for us to maintain.
>
Could you produce a diff?  FWIW, I've attached the changes in the Wak
adaption -- there are only differences in the test suite, which uses
some implementation-specifics, and also `cond-expand' which is not
available on Racket (which is one of the implementations targetet by
Wak).  I've not yet bothered to submit those upstream, since I assume
they would not be accepted, as they (a) disable some tests that rely on
implementation-specific extensions (b) probably break on the author's
system.

+changes-0.7.diff
Description: Text Data

Regards, Rotty
-- 
Andreas Rottmann -- <http://rotty.yi.org/>