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5.1 Loading a system

The system foo is loaded (and compiled, if necessary) by evaluating the following Lisp form:

(asdf:load-system :foo)

On some implementations (namely recent versions of ABCL, Clozure CL, CMUCL, ECL, GNU CLISP, MKCL and SBCL), ASDF hooks into the CL:REQUIRE facility and you can just use:

(require :foo)

In older versions of ASDF, you needed to use (asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :foo). If your ASDF is too old to provide asdf:load-system though we recommend that you upgrade to ASDF 3. See Loading ASDF from source.

Note the name of a system is specified as a string or a symbol. If a symbol (including a keyword), its name is taken and lowercased. The name must be a suitable value for the :name initarg to make-pathname in whatever filesystem the system is to be found.

The lower-casing-symbols behaviour is unconventional, but was selected after some consideration. The type of systems we want to support either have lowercase as customary case (Unix, Mac, Windows) or silently convert lowercase to uppercase (lpns).