Library archives

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| The package system provided by GHC and NHC provides an 
| alternate place where libraries could be specified.  Can 
| someone familiar with packages and with Hugs comment on 
| whether they'd be able to replace the ffi's library spec and 
| would make sense for typical Hugs usage. And would that meet 
| SimonPJ's need too?

I honestly don't know, but I don't think it's worth bending the design
to accommodate something we aren't actively doing and don't
fully understand (ie. a .NET ffi).  

However, I *believe* that the square bracket part is like the module
name in a Haskell qualified name... it says where the name comes
from.  It makes sense to be able to specify that on a call-by-call
basis.  Two different libraries might have a procedure with the
same name, and you might want to import both into the same FFI
interface.

Simon