Chicken » Module (scheme load)

## Module (scheme load)

load filename #!optional environment-specifierprocedure

  It is an error if filename is not a string.

  The load procedure reads expressions and definitions from the file designated by filename and evaluates them sequentially in the environment specified by environment-specifier. If environment-specifier is omitted, (interaction-environment) is assumed.

  The load procedure does not affect the values returned by current-input-port and current-output-port. It returns an unspecified value.

  CHICKEN offers a few extensions to the R7RS definition of `load`:

  - The environment specifier may also be a procedure of a single argument taking a expression and is used to evaluate every toplevel expression read from the input file, if the file contains Scheme source code.
  - On platforms that support it (currently BSD, Haiku, MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, and Windows), `load` can be used to load shared objects.

  Example for loading compiled programs:

      % cat x.scm
      (define (hello) (print "Hello!"))
      % csc -s x.scm
      % csi -q
      #;1> (load "x.so")
      ; loading x.so ...
      #;2> (hello)
      Hello!
      #;3>

  There are some limitations and caveats to the CHICKEN extensions you need to be aware of:

  - The second argument to `load` is ignored when loading compiled code.
  - A compiled file can only be loaded once. Subsequent attempts to load the same file have no effect.

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