8 Library Interchange

8.5 File naming conventions

In practice, importing a source distribution into a Dylan program involves unpacking the source distribution into its own subtree and then informing the environment of the location of the tree root. The environment then walks the entire subtree locating LID files, which describe the libraries in the distribution by giving a name to, and designating the source files associated with, each library.

Importing a Dylan program into the environment in this way requires two things:

: 1. That the LID files in the distribution can be identified.
: 2. That the file designators supplied to the Files: keyword in LID files can be mapped to the corresponding source filenames on disk.

If you are importing files from a platform that does not insist on, or conventionally use, standard filename suffixes to identify the filetype (such as MacOS), then you must rename your source files as follows:

LID files must be given filenames with the suffix .lid.
Dylan source files must be given filenames with the suffix .dylan or .dyl.

The file designators that appear in LID files may be a string of characters of any length, constructed from the set of hyphen, underscore, and the mixed-case alphanumeric characters. Note that you do not have to specify the source filename suffix as part of the filename designator. This ensures that the LID files themselves do not need to be edited when importing source code from a platform, such as MacOS, that does not insist on particular filename suffixes to specify the file type.

The name of a LID file is not significant, and in particular need not be the same as the library name. Hierarchical directory structure can be used to organize multi-library systems as long as the files directly associated with each library are in a single directory.