[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Shorter Import Syntax

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 06/04/2015 02:14 PM, Anthony Cowley wrote:
> Sorry, Yuras! I wanted to make sure the dissenting voices were heard.
> 
> The current vote count is ~28-4. It seems like we're on the precipice
> of a fatal bike shedding, so I'm counting all the votes for keeping
> "quantified" as negative (as that's what Richard stated for himself),
> and trying to be conservative counting the +1's. I hope that's enough
> of a majority.
> 
> To put things in perspective again, the Stackage package set has 10x
> as many qualified imports as unqualified imports that use the "as"
> keyword. The point here is to slightly smooth things out for the 10-1
> majority case.
> 
> While I do appreciate that these two lines can potentially be mistaken
> for each other,
> 
> import Map as M (fromList)
> import Map (fromList) as M
> 
> I think the movement of the explicit import group is quite visibly
> striking, and, as previously noted, you could misread the former every
> time and only misunderstand 0.3% of import statements you read.
> 

Here's what I don't like about this, although I'm not necessarily giving
it the thumbs down. Currently, the parentheses come at the end of the
line, like

  import Foo (bar)
  import qualified Foo as F (bar)

So, when your import list gets huge, it's easy to break:

  import Foo (
    bar1,
    bar2,
    ,,,,
    barN )

  import qualified Foo as F (
    baz1,
    baz2,
    ,,,,
    bazN )

With the new syntax, you have two towers of names:

  import Foo (
    bar1,
    bar2,
    ...,
    barN ) as F ( -- This line is ugly and important and buried
    baz1,
    baz2,
    ...
    bazN )