Issue 16
0. Introduction
Welcome to the belated issue 16 of the Chicken Gazette.
1. The Hatching Farm
It has been a bit quiet in the egg repository apart from Kon Lovett releasing a new version of the lookup-table egg. Alan Post has been busy getting his genturfa'i egg into shape. Mario Goulart has ported the statvfs egg to chicken 4.
2. Core development
In the experimental branch of the code repository several bugs have been fixed this week:
- Ticket #438: Makefile's clean target removed generated setup-api DISTFILEs which is not acceptable.
- Ticket #340: (Spiffy hangs occasionally (again!)) has been closed since it seems that the fixes introduced in the safer-scheduler branch are fixing (or hiding) the problem. Additionally Peter fixed a couple of bugs in the openssl bindings.
- Ticket #424: (umask support) our first change request has been accepted!
- Ticket #447: Inconsistencies when calling set-finalizer! multiple times have been found by Moritz Heidkamp and fixed by Felix Winkelmann. Finalizers are scanned first and then marked to make sure the first mark will trigger the finalizer of the object.
- Ticket #444: Symbol lookup fails in modules in conjunction with renaming macros: Peter Bex came up with a patch to fix this bug which turned out to be of a more general nature than just affecting the IR-macro expander.
Also chicken now has another scrutinizer mode called -picky. When given, the scrutinizer warns about undefined branches in conditionals in tail-position of global procedures that do not perform a self-call. as Felix explains on chicken-users
The debug switch -:d is now also handed to the chicken program by the compiler driver csc.
And we welcome back our lambda lifting code which has been put back into the experimental branch by Felix.
3. Chicken Talk
But alas, this has also been bug finding week! Alan Post as well as Moritz and Peter stumbled over some strange findings during the last week. Alan's genturfa'i egg somehow caused the compiler to create huge amounts of code as you know from last week's issue. This week Alan wanted to check for common subexpression in his data and compared the whole list with equal? which contained in his case circular defined procedures. Equal? traversed these structures blowing up the heap. If you are interested in the process of this issue follow ticket #440.
Sven Hartrumpf pointed out a problem in the handling of a huge number of command line arguments, which Felix fixed in the experimental branch.
David Dreisigmeyer has been running into problems with the bind egg's parser that still have to be resolved.
Apart from other smaller questions to the list we have experienced an outtake of the chicken-users mailing list due to the recent hack at GNU's savannah site. In the meantime FSF's admin have been able to restore the list and its archives to full functionality. Thanks for that. If the main archive at nongnu.org is not available you can use mirrors of this archive at mail-archive.com.
4. Omelette Recipes
This week I'd like to give you a brief introduction to Chicken's module system. Modules form a namespace or environment. Basically you can think of modules as containers for bindings. Also you have full control over which bindings are exported from a module. This way you don't have to worry about polluting the global namespace with auxiliary bindings. No silly name prefixes anymore! An example illustrates this best:
(module palindrome
(palindromify palindrome?)
(import chicken scheme extras)
(use srfi-13)
(define max-length 100)
(define (palindromify s)
(string-append s (string-reverse s)))
(define (palindrome? s)
(let* ((len (string-length s))
(half (quotient len 2)))
(cond ((> len max-length)
(error 'palindrome?
(format "palindromes may not be longer than ~A characters" max-length)))
((odd? len)
(palindrome? (string-append (string-take s half)
(string-drop s (+ half 1)))))
(else (string=? (string-reverse (string-take s half))
(string-drop s half))))))
)
As you can see, it's pretty straight forward. Unsurprisingly, the module form introduces a module definition. The first symbol palindrome is the module's name, followed by a list of symbols to be exported from the module: (palindromify palindrome?). These symbols have to be bound somewhere inside the module. The rest of the form is regular Scheme establishing these bindings. The first thing we have to do is (import chicken scheme srfi-13). Yes, this means a module's environment is completely blank initially (except for the import form) thus we even have to import scheme, yet! This is an especially nice way to create an environment for a DSL: No regular Scheme bindings are going to get in your way. In our case we stick to Chicken flavored Scheme and some SRFI-13 goodness to define a few palindrome procedures. Note that we define a max-length of 100 characters inside our module without exporting it. This means users of our module will not be able to touch that limit. Further note that code inside the module form is not indented since usually there's only one module definition spanning the whole file.
How to use this module now? Well, just import it like any other module. Try sticking the above code into a palindrome.scm file, load it in a csi REPL and then (import palindrome):
#;1> (load "palindrome.scm") ; loading palindrome.scm ... #;2> (import palindrome) #;3> (palindrome? "chicken") #f #;4> (palindromify "fo") "foof" #;5> (palindrome? (palindromify "fo")) #t #;6> max-length Error: unbound variable: max-length
See, no rocket science in that, though some basic linguistics. The best thing is that the modules we imported into our palindrome module are not visible in the environment our module is imported into. So if our REPL environment hadn't srfi-13 imported before importing our module, it still won't have it afterwards. Nice!
One thing that might cause confusion is that Chicken eggs are not equal to modules, although many eggs consist of just one module. The difference is that eggs may contain any kind of Chicken Scheme code, be it only one module, many modules, one or more programs or just some raw definitions. It's all up to the egg author. Then you have accompanying egg specific forms like require-library which loads a module from an egg and use/require-extension which load and then import egg modules. How these are used and how eggs are built is beyond the scope of this recipe but you may want to check out the eggs tutorial on the wiki.
5. About the Chicken Gazette
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