[Haskell-cafe] Design your modules for qualified import

[Johan Tibell]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
> I think designing modules for qualified-only use is a mistake.  I also
> think import lists get quite ugly, with multiple instances of

I was only suggesting avoiding namespacing prefixes/suffixes in
identifiers. Other than that things would be the same. You don't have
to import things as qualified. However, if you're going to try to
avoid using identifiers in your exported interface because they would
collide with other modules I would advice against it. I agree with you
that the module imports get a bit ugly. I prefer that to the
alternative though.

> Add to this that people will assign a variation of abbreviations for
> modules, we quickly lose consistency.

It's a shame that we have such deep hierarchies otherwise we wouldn't
need to always alias out module imports. I think Python get's it
right:

import os

... os.tmpname ...

Duncan's recommendation of just taking the part after the last dot
seems like a good rule of thumb. Doing

import qualified Data.Map as M

does gain you much in my opinion. Compare M.empty to emptyM. No
difference, you still can't deduce the module by just looking at the
call site.

Cheers,

Johan