We Need A Syntax For "IMPORT Relative To System.Script.Path"

[hostilefork]

@rgchris

I don't know that my proposed r3 scheme for Oldes' Rebol variant is 'timeless,' but in a very small amount of code, it solves exactly the above problem in an implementation-neutral way.

Ren-C has committed to CHAIN!, so word1:word2... is not evaluator-inert. Hence URI!-based schemes would face some notational limits, and need to either be quoted or in a block.

 import 'r3:rgchris:deflate

 import [r3:rgchris:deflate]

It may be that IMPORT should always take a BLOCK!, I don't know

But if it was going to be URL!, they presently have to have form xxx://yyy so it would have to look like that:

 import r3://rgchris:deflate

@rgchris

They have a standardized syntax and Rebol has an infrastructure based around expressing and resolving them.

It is a bit annoying to have to design another extensibility model for abstracting "where to read from" such that TAG!s and CHAIN!s and TUPLE!s and @WORDs etc. etc. all have to get their say... and potentially have to define encoding schemes to deal with gnarly aspects of reality of strange characters in file paths etc.

But I think it's likely worth it for this important case. Maybe everything could ultimately be translated into a URL! (even FILE! perhaps to a file:///) and it's just a thin notational layer above that.