[Haskell-cafe] circular imports

[Henning Thielemann]

On Mon, 6 Sep 2010, Evan Laforge wrote:

> I have a few techniques to get out:
>
> - Replace Things with ThingIds which have no big dependencies, and can
> then be looked up in a Map later.  This replaces direct access with
> lookup and thows some extra Maybes in there, which is not very nice.
>
> - Cleverly use type variables to try to factor out the problematic
> type.  Then I can stitch the data structure back together at a higher
> level with a type alias.  This is sort of complicated and awkward.

That's what I typically make. It was only once, where I could not easily 
decide which datatype to make the parameter of the other one.

> - Move the declarations that must be moved to the low level module,
> re-export them from the module that defines their (smart)
> constructors, and pretend like they belong to that module.  This works
> well when it can work, but makes the code awkward to navigate and
> doesn't let you hide their implementation unless you give up and move
> the rest of the code in as well.

I often need Private modules anyway for package-wide definitions. Then I 
define the type in the Private module and export it only from the 
corresponding public module. Unfortunately, Haddock does not play nicely 
with it. I would like to tell Haddock to treat the public module as the 
one that defines the type.

> Is this a problem others have noticed?  Any other ideas or solutions?

Unfortunately no more ideas, but you may add more thoughts to
   http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Mutually_recursive_modules#Resolve_mutual_recursion