On Sep 10, 2009, at 6:31 PM, Aubrey Jaffer wrote: > SLIB solved these problems years ago. The notion of file location is > abstrcted into "vicinities", of which SRFI-59 specifies five: > > program-vicinity > library-vicinity > implementation-vicinity > user-vicinity > home-vicinity > > The procedure SUB-VICINITY can access sub-directories. > > SRFI-59 says: > Vicinities need not be tied to individual files in a file system. > The files named could be members of a zip archive, as Java does. > Vicinities can even be used on flat file systems (which have no > directory structure) by having the vicinity express constraints on > the file name. On most systems a vicinity is a string.
As a general concept, this appears to be a renaming of "directory". There are plenty of systems which allow "directories" to be accessed which are the members of a zip archive, remote network shares, and other virtual resources. Is there something I'm missing? As a specific instantiation, I have a significant problem with the specification of `program-vicinity'. How can an ordinary procedure like `program-vicinity' return information about where its call was located? This needs to be syntax in order to work properly, or the call needs to be on the right-hand side of a let-syntax. (This is why you see things like (LOAD-TIME-VALUE *LOAD-TRUENAME*) or #.*COMPILE- FILE-PATHNAME* in Common Lisp.) -- Brian Mastenbrook [email protected] http://brian.mastenbrook.net/ _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
