Proposals for changes to searching behaviour

[nilsson@cs.yale.edu]

Hi Alastair!

> The suggested changes sound hard to understand and to implement
> consistently in all compilers.  I lean towards leaving the spec as it
> is.

I think they're pretty straightforward, actually.

Coudl you elaborate on why it seems complicated to you?

As to implementation, I can't imagine that it would be that difficult
to get something reasonably consistent. After all, different compilers/
interpreters have managed to handle a language like Haskell98 with
extensions in a fairly consitent manner.

> IIRC, the current Hugs semantics is a complex balancing act intended
> to achieve backward compatability and implement module paths at the
> same time.  I'd prefer to see everyone switch over to the new way so
> that we can drop old features.

Which way is the old and which is the new?

I've noticed that Hugs looks fore.g. a module "A.B.C" in both
"A/B/C.hs" and "A.B.C.hs", which seems nice to me and is part of what
we suggested. The only extra addition would be to associate prefixes
with directories in the search path. Is that really complicated?

Regards,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
Yale University
Department of Computer Science
nilsson@cs.yale.edu