[Haskell-cafe] Re: 2 modules in one file

[Aaron Denney]

On 2008-08-30, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
> On 2008 Aug 30, at 4:22, Aaron Denney wrote:
>> On 2008-08-27, Henrik Nilsson <nhn at Cs.Nott.AC.UK> wrote:
>>> And there are also potential issues with not every legal module name
>>> being a legal file name across all possible file systems.
>>
>> I find this unconvincing.  Broken file systems need to be fixed.
>
> Language people trying to impose constraints on filesystems is the  
> tail wagging the dog.

I'd say it's just the opposite.  The purpose of a filesystem is to
hold user data, in ways convenient to the user, which means dictating
a usable interface.  Dictating the implementation would be closer to
tail wagging the dog, though even that's not quite the right metaphor --
it's just a layering violation.  The user is in this case GHC or other
compiler adopting the suggestion in the Hierarchical modules extension.
Just as non-hierarchical file systems have long been considered broken,
I think it's safe to now declare that one that doesn't support unicode
in some fashion, even if only a userland convention of using UTF-8, is
indeed less usable, and hence broken.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-