Imports

In Cairo, as is the case with other programming languages, it’s undesirable and impractical to keep an entire program in one source file. To avoid this, and to facilitate modularity, Cairo allows importing a module from another file, with the following syntax:

from a.b import c as d

This will search for a Cairo module a.b, and import c from it, binding it to the name d in this module. The as clause is optional, and without it, c will simply be bound to the local name c. Several tokens can be imported from the same Cairo file using the following syntax:

from a.b import c as d, e, f

Import search paths

When Cairo looks for the module a.b in the example above, it will search for a file a/b.cairo in the paths it has been configured to search. The paths searched are taken from a colon-separated list that can be set in two ways:

• The --cairo_path argument to the Cairo compiler.

• The environment variable CAIRO_PATH.

For example, in order to add /home/cairo_libs and /tmp/cairo_libs to the path list used by the Cairo compiler, one can run either of the following lines:

cairo-compile --cairo_path="/home/cairo_libs:/tmp/cairo_libs" ...

CAIRO_PATH="/home/cairo_libs:/tmp/cairo_libs" cairo-compile ...

In addition, Cairo will search the current directory and the standard library directory relative to the compiler path.

The Cairo compiler will automatically detect and fail on cyclic imports or multiple imports sharing the same name in a single Cairo file.