[plt-scheme] conditional module inclusion and compilation

On Sep 2, 2009, at 7:52 PM, Eli Barzilay wrote:
> Compiling files will save you the compilation cost so if you run long
> processes there's no real difference.

Good -- that's what I thought and the same as compilation in CL, but I  
didn't know if there was some other reason for creating .zo files. In  
the case of my current project compilation takes less than a second  
and runtimes will often be hours, so it's not an issue.

> You have the freedom -- you can even do a reader thing similar to the
> CL #+ -- but the default makes it harder to trip on these bugs (which
> can get very nasty).

Understood. Part of my attitude is probably just from being a newcomer  
and feeling, probably often out of ignorance, like it's harder to do  
some things I'm used to doing in CL (e.g. in areas like writing macros  
with arbitrary expansions, using eval, and splitting code over  
multiple files without having to think about modules). In many such  
cases I'm probably just wrong, but I do think there's more of a focus  
on safety in this community. This is probably for the good in most  
situations, particularly when people are developing large software  
systems that will be used by others, but it can also sometimes feel  
constraining, particularly when developing small experimental systems  
for one's own use.

  -Lee

PS Just to clear up something really minor from a previous post, my  
description of a CL solutionwould only really have made sense if both  
of these functions had the same name:

> #+:MACOSX(defun report-plot () <do stuff here that produces graphics  
> using stuff in the plot module>)
>
> #-:MACOSX(defun report () (values)) ;; just do nothing if I'm not in  
> macosx, which also means I don't have the plot module



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Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science
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