In the process of working with Dylan, the Gwydion Project has come up with numerous extensions to the Dylan language. Some of them form entire libraries, like Collection-Extensions or String-Extensions libraries. Others have been added to the Dylan library, in such modules as Extensions and System.
We continue to make no claims about future support for our extensions. However, some extensions are more likely than others to make it into our future compilers. This file documents those extensions which we think will be included in our compiler’s Dylan library.
Extensions which go in separate libraries are documented in their own files; extensions which are part of the Mindy Dylan library but which have a less certain future are documented in the Mindy documentation.
For the remainder of this chapter, we shall refer to “Gwydion compilers” as a shorthand for “Mindy and other Dylan compilers that the Gwydion Project may write.” It is not meant as a guarantee that all future Gwydion releases will support these extensions.
Specific Gwydion compilers may support extensions not listed here; see their documentation for details.
In the process of working with Dylan, the Gwydion Project has come up with numerous extensions to the Dylan language. | |
In addition to containing the Dylan module, the Dylan library contains a variety of modules which provide extensions. |
In addition to containing the Dylan module, the Dylan library contains a variety of modules which provide extensions. Gwydion compilers export the following modules from the Dylan library:
The Extensions module exports useful extensions to the Dylan language. Ultimately, there will be several, more logically separate libraries that extend Dylan or provide an application framework for users. For now, we put any commonly used utilities in the Extensions module.
The System module exports an interface to operating system calls and special, low-level functionality.
The Introspection module exports reflective operations for examining classes, functions, and so on.
The Cheap-IO module exports some basic, unextendable input and output functionality. For all but the most trivial applications, it is better to use the IO library instead.