[Haskell-cafe] What's in a name?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2008, Andrew Coppin wrote:

> Henning Thielemann wrote:
>> 
>> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hierarchical_module_names
>
>
> Right. So if for some reason two people both developed a hashtable 
> implementation (say), we would end up with two modules both called 
> Data.Hashtable, but (hopefully) the packages themselves would be called 
> james-hashtable and chris-hashtable (or something).
>
> Now both packages can be installed at once, but when I say "import 
> Data.Hashtable", GHC has no way to know which one I mean. That doesn't sound 
> too clever to me...

Although it is possible to hide packages by GHC options, we should not do 
this, because several libraries might use different Hash tables and it 
would not be possible to write a program which uses many of these 
libraries. It's better to add a distinguishing part to the module name, 
like Data.HashTable.Coppin or so.