Re: Confusing Error Message

[Andy Wingo]

Hi Noah,

A question from a while back, but hey, an answer:

On Wed 14 Mar 2012 01:43, Noah Lavine <address@hidden> writes:

> It's not intuitive that a function that is available by at the REPL is
> not available in a module.  [referring to `compile']

There are a few more things that are like this, FWIW: (ice-9 top-repl)
loads the following modules into (guile-user) (but not (guile)):

      (ice-9 r5rs)
      (ice-9 session)
      (ice-9 regex)
      (ice-9 threads)

> I don't even know where to go to look up what things are available in
> a module and what are not.

,apropos is a good one.

> Was this limitation on purpose?

Yes.  Loading `compile' loads the compiler and a bunch of other things.
It's something you would like to avoid doing for programs that don't
invoke the compiler.  OTOH it is convenient to have at the REPL.  For
that reason it's an autoload, but only in (guile-user).

> If so, I'd like to know what's going on so I can document it more.

Patches very much welcome, and we can change the situation in 2.2 if
there is a better state of affairs.

Cheers,

Andy
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