[Haskell-cafe] mutually recursive modules

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 10:46:25AM -0700, Fergus Henderson wrote:
>   (2) Although most of the mutual recursion occurred only in the
>       intermediate stages of the refactoring, some of the mutual
>       recursion remained at the end of the refactoring, forcing
>       two modules with only the smallest degree of coupling to be
>       combined into a single module.
>   
> 	  The two modules in question were (a) the module which defines
> 	  the calling interface between the Cryptol front-end and the
> 	  various Cryptol back-ends, and (b) the module which defines the
> 	  structure which records the settings of command-line options.
> 	  Here (a) depends on (b) because one of the parameters which
> 	  is passed to the back-ends is the command-line option settings,
> 	  and (b) depends on (a) because one of the option settings is
> 	  the currently selected back-end (represented using an
> 	  existentially quantified typeclass-constrained type).

As a programmer not necessarily speaking about Haskell, I also find that
mutually dependent modules are often natural in practice, and that
avoiding them requires excessive and awkward factoring.  Eg, a
configuration module C and a database module D, in which D depends on C
because the configuration contains the database to use, and C depends on
D because configuration data (other than which database to use!) can
come from the database.

I think that on principle, haskell implementors should not doubt that
programmers will find good use for mutually recursive modules if they
are available in a convenient form.

Andrew