Hi! Danny Milosavljevic <dan...@scratchpost.org> skribis:
> On Sun, 15 Nov 2020 14:02:04 +0100 > zimoun <zimon.touto...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> In an ideal world, the first ’,a’ could provide hint for the module to >> ’,use’ > > There is no "the" module. Any number of modules could have your searched-for > symbol--and the procedures so found could do completely unrelated things. One > of the points of using modules in the first place is in order to group > together > related things (and in order not to have unrelated things together). Yup. > What would be nice is for the module names to be easy to understand so you > know > which module to import. That's currently not great. For example I have no > idea when something goes into (guix packages) vs (gnu packages). There’s a rationale: (guix …) is for Guix-the-tool (the mechanisms) whereas (gnu …) is for the distribution. Thus, ‘specification->package’, which browses (gnu packages …), is in (gnu packages). Module names are chosen to reflect the architecture of the code, so it can be opaque to a newcomer. I’m sure we can improve but there’s necessarily that limitation. > Also, it would be nice and easy to implement to actually have the Guile REPL > search for all possible loadable modules that contain some symbol if it > encounters an unknown symbol, and print those, too (Guix often already does > that anyway!). > > It should be easy to add such a thing to the guile repl. In addition to > ",describe" and ",apropos" there would be ",search" which would loop through > all modules, find the specified symbol and then print the docstrings of each > of those, including the module to use for each. > > But since these modules can contain code that runs at module import time, > that's maybe also not what you want to actually happen (it would execute > code of random modules that are in the search path). > Then again, guile has declarative modules, too. If those don't do that, > maybe just search in those. > > Also, maybe you don't want Guile to actually IMPORT things into your namespace > when you do ",search". You just want guile to list them. That would be the > only complication. Yeah the unbound-variable hint, for example, currently looks at already-loaded modules. Triggering extra loads could have undesirable side effects: I/O storm, increased memory usage, unwanted code executed, etc. Likewise, bindings, docstrings, etc. are all things that exist in a live Guile system. So searching them normally involves loading all the code, which is unreasonable. Now, .go files are ELF these days, and they contain docstrings and a symbol table. So one could implement a module search that parses ELF files, browses docstrings and symbols, thus without ever running code. Andy, if you read this, what are your thoughts? Thanks, Ludo’.
