[racket-dev] Trouble with state, submodules, and module-begin

On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 11:08 AM, Matthew Flatt <mflatt at cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> At Tue, 3 Jul 2012 11:05:52 -0400, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt wrote:
>> However, I don't (yet) think it's the right solution.  In particular,
>> I feel like this moves away from the really great feature of
>> submodules, which is that they behave basically exactly like regular
>> modules.  From what I can tell, the only place where this uniformity
>> breaks down currently is with `(module* name #f ....)', where the
>> outer module is `require`d *before* the inner module starts expanding.
>>  In other words, if we have:
>>
>> (module M L
>>    (module* N #f ...))
>>
>> currently `M` is required *before* `N` begins expanding, which is
>> unlike any other module relationship that can be expressed in Racket
>> (I think).
>
> How does it differ from
>
>  (module M L ....)
>  (module N M ....)

You're totally right.  Good thing I added that "(I think)" qualifier. :)

However, I think of the submodule case as more like:

  (module M L ....)
  (module N L (require M) ....)

except with the ability to see more of `M` than `require` normally exposes.

Thinking further about your example, I think that it would also break
the conditional environment updates that I'm thinking of.  I think
that means that I need to go back to the drawing board and think about
the requirements here.
-- 
sam th
samth at ccs.neu.edu