Need a native "import" from other *.sl files

[John Stilley]

I need a way to import code held in other *.sl files. This is very important to being able to build larger programs.

Ideally, this should work well with importing *.py files (and libraries).

[John Stilley]

This *.sl import command would have to be native, in the evaluator. There I can use Python to .read() a file into a string, evaluate it, and throw all definitions into the environment.

There are decisions to make here. Do I just naively parse the entire imported file? What if the file has many lines that return/print results? This is easier if it's all just defs. What does Python do?

It seems to me that Python just imports names and definitions, and doesn't execute any particular code. The new names are then available via:

• importfile.new_name if you do import importfile
• new_name if you do from importfile import new_name
• new_name if you do from importfile import *

To start with, perhaps I could just import performing like from importfile import *.
And I won't start of worrying about creating a PYTHONPATH, all imports will have to be given via local path.
Also, I will start by only import def statements from other *.sl files.

[John Stilley]

This will be even easier than I thought. We already have a function interpreter.interpret_file.