Expanding Signed Unit Expressions

The unit/sig, compound-unit/sig, and invoke-unit/sig forms expand into expressions using the unit, compound-unit, and invoke-unit forms, respectively. The expansion may also use global-defined-signature rather than inlining a signature that is bound to a global identifier.

A signed unit value is represented by a unit-with-signature structure with the following fields:

• unit -- the primitive unit implementing the signed unit's content
• imports -- the import signatures, represented as a list of pairs, where each pair consists of
  • a tag symbol, used for error reporting; and
  • an ``exploded signature''; an exploded signature is a vector of signature elements, where each element is either
    • a symbol, representing a variable in the signature; or
    • a pair consisting of a symbol and an exploded signature, representing a name sub-signature.

• exports -- the export signature, represented as an exploded signature

To perform the signature checking needed by compound-unit/sig, MzScheme provides two procedures:

• (verify-signature-match where exact? dest-context dest-sig src-context src-sig) raises an exception unless the exploded signatures dest-sig and src-sig match. If exact? is #f, then src-sig need only satisfy dest-sig, otherwise the signatures must match exactly. The where symbol and dest-context and src-context strings are used for generating an error message string: where is used as the name of the signaling procedure and dest-context and src-context are used as the respective signature names.

  If the match succeeds, void is returned. If the match fails, the exn:unit exception is raised for one of the following reasons:

  • The signatures fail to match because src-sig is missing an element.
  • The signatures fail to match because src-sig contains an extra element.
  • The signatures fail to match because src-dest and src-sig contain the same element name but for different element types.

• (verify-linkage-signature-match where tags units export-sigs linking-sigs) performs all of the run-time signature checking required by a compound-unit/sig or invoke-unit/sig expression. The where symbol is used for error reporting. The tags argument is a list of tag symbols, and the units argument is the corresponding list of candidate signed unit values. (The procedure will check whether these values are actually signed unit values.)

  The export-sigs list contains one exploded signature for each tag; these correspond to the tag signatures provided in the original compound-unit/sig expression. The linking-sigs list contains a list of named exploded signatures for each tag (where a ``named signature'' is a pair consisting of a name symbol and an exploded signature); every tag's list corresponds to the signatures that were specified or inferred for the tag's linkage specification in the original compound-unit/sig expression. The names on the linking signatures are used for error messages.

  If all linking checks succeed, void is returned. If any check fails, the exn:unit exception is raised for one of the following reasons:

  • A value in the units list is not a signed unit.
  • The number of import signatures associated with a unit does not agree with the number of linking signatures specified by the corresponding list in linking-sigs.
  • A linking signature does not exactly match the signature expected by an importing unit.