# 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](https://git.koszko.org/guix/about).  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](https://reuse.software/) 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.