[Haskell-cafe] What's in a name?

[Andrew Coppin]

Henning Thielemann wrote:
>
> On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Henning Thielemann wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>>
>>> The naming of cats is a difficult matter...
>>>
>>> Ahem. So as you may have noticed, we seem to have a profusion of 
>>> packages all called "binary" or something dangeriously similar. 
>>> There's also several "MD5" packages. I could point out a few others. 
>>> So what I'm wondering is... Do we have a formal convention for the 
>>> naming of packages and/or the naming of the modules they contain?
>>
>> There is a page on the Wiki which lists several common top-level 
>> module names. Unfortunately www.haskell.org seems to be down currently.
>
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hierarchical_module_names


Right. So if for some reason two people both developed a hashtable 
implementation (say), we would end up with two modules both called 
Data.Hashtable, but (hopefully) the packages themselves would be called 
james-hashtable and chris-hashtable (or something).

Now both packages can be installed at once, but when I say "import 
Data.Hashtable", GHC has no way to know which one I mean. That doesn't 
sound too clever to me...