[Haskell-cafe] Design your modules for qualified import

[Nicolas Pouillard]

Excerpts from johan.tibell's message of Mon Jun 09 21:53:50 +0200 2008:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
> > I think designing modules for qualified-only use is a mistake.  I also
> > think import lists get quite ugly, with multiple instances of
> 
> I was only suggesting avoiding namespacing prefixes/suffixes in
> identifiers. Other than that things would be the same. You don't have
> to import things as qualified. However, if you're going to try to
> avoid using identifiers in your exported interface because they would
> collide with other modules I would advice against it. I agree with you
> that the module imports get a bit ugly. I prefer that to the
> alternative though.
> 
> > Add to this that people will assign a variation of abbreviations for
> > modules, we quickly lose consistency.
> 
> It's a shame that we have such deep hierarchies otherwise we wouldn't
> need to always alias out module imports. I think Python get's it
> right:
> 
> import os
> 
> ... os.tmpname ...
> 
> Duncan's recommendation of just taking the part after the last dot
> seems like a good rule of thumb. Doing
> 
> import qualified Data.Map as M
> 
> does gain you much in my opinion. Compare M.empty to emptyM. No
> difference, you still can't deduce the module by just looking at the
> call site.

Coming  from a world where qualified names at call sites or full import (open)
are  the  default  rules  (OCaml),  I  much  prefer  the import way (where you
specify  names  that  gets  imported) and thus prefer when names don't collide
(except  for  modules  like  Data.Map  or  ByteString  where  I  use  the "as"
notation).

The  key point for me is to be able to trace as fast as possible what precisely
use a module by looking (only) at the top of the file.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai
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