de Paul records
Software freedom empowers sharing. Let's dedicate our libre software projects to saints known for fostering sharing!
This Guile records library is dedicated to St. Vincent de Paul, a french priest from 17th century who served the poor. Being a great organizer, he managed to encourage even high-rank nobles to participate in charity work. Apparently, he had more success than we have with encouraging state authorities to start caring about digital freedom…
Why another records API?
GNU Guile implements SRFI-9 which already provides a records API. Guile also
includes a GNU extension in (srfi srfi-9 gnu) which provides an API for purely
functional records.
What these APIs lack is a nice syntax for record construction. The constructor procedures they generate do — at the time of writing — only accept positional arguments which makes their use error-prone. A solution would be to — for every record type defined — define one "null" record object and then construct subsequent records of this type by cloning and modifying that null record.
This library builds upon @code{(srfi srfi-9 gnu)} to aid with this and also with other tasks. Features include
- automatic deriving of getter names from field names,
- automatic generation of record constructor macros,
- support for default field values,
- support for programmer-supplied record finalizer procedures,
- syntax for creation of a record object based on an existing one,
- optional automatic export of generated getters and other variables,
- and amended variants of
(ice-9 match)forms with (unhygienic) record matcher that allows fields to be matched by name.
This library is inspired by the Guix records API but follows purely functional approach.
Use examples
Please look into the test suite in tests/guile/.
Building & installation
This software has a Guix package definition in Wojtek's personal channel. That can serve you as a point of reference.
Copying
The source code of this package is available under CC0 v1.0. The repository is kept compliant with the REUSE specification, version 3.0.
Note that the uderlying GNU Guile language is covered by the GNU GPL and hence any binary redistribution of de Paul records shall be covered by it as well.