Excellent, could we get some sort of separate forum to talk about this project though to discuss bugs, recent patches, etc.. I noticed you have a module system up now, but I can't get it to work:
arc> (impas blah spec)
#3(tagged mac #<procedure>)
arc> (blah:do2 nil nil nil)
Error: "reference to undefined identifier: _blah"
And I'm not sure why it doesn't work, but I also have an Idea for a more general impas function:
The import.arc stuff is a sketch. One of it's many shortcomings is that if you define a function blah and then use it from inside the same module/file, it won't be able to find blah, because it's been silently renamed |modulename blah| .
The problem you're having seems to be different, though.
After looking, I realize that my testing process was masking a bug where I didn't change some symbol dereference. It's fixed now on my machine, but I'm new to git, and not sure what I need to do to make it show up in the repository. I did git push, but that doesn't seem to have made it appear in the commit list.
EDIT: okay, nex3 helpfully explained things to me, so this fix is in the arc-wiki repo now. It still doesn't change use points, though, as mentioned above.
Replying to myself because it seems as good a place as any...
We could walk the tree of a module and patch up any symbols we find that were referenced in a def or mac, but that's not a clean solution, since it can't find all actual calls (something could be building up names, for example, which we'd never find by walking the tree).
What this means is that any module system built right now, as far as I can tell, will have to require support from those writing the modules, but since renaming modules is implicit in how import.arc works at the moment, there's no way to know what the call should look like, for the module programmer. I can't see any way around this except to change Arc itself to make function and macro definitions respect lexical boundaries, rather than all being bound at the top level. Until that change is made, all we can do is fake a module system.
