[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: Shorter Import Syntax

[Sven Panne]

2015-06-05 7:52 GMT+02:00 Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com>:

> [...] I think there is a burden on the proposer to demonstrate a decent
> power-to-weight ratio for the change, and saving a few characters at the
> expense of introducing considerable confusion just does not seem right to
> me.  "The new syntax does not let us do anything we cannot do now."  On the
> other hand, I could imagine a different import system altogether being
> attractive, perhaps a higher-order one like ML modules, although someone
> would have to flesh out the details.
>

Just another +1 to everything Malcolm wrote: IMHO the proposal is just
bikeshedding and doesn't really buy us much. Saving a few keystrokes is not
a good argument when it comes to language design, see e.g. Perl or the
latest additions to JavaScript. The current syntax might be a bit verbose,
but it's easily comprehensible, and the proposal is a bit confusing. I
would really welcome some more powerful module system, e.g. in the spirit
of ML/OCaml, but not some ad hoc changes to the current one.

Regarding the grep on Stackage: Here transitive dependencies should be
taken into account, so I guess the overall breakage would be much, much
higher. A per-module/package grep is basically meaningless.

Finally: Enabling anything by default what might break something is a total
no-go, *unless* everybody agrees that the current state of affairs is
broken and the new state is much better. Both doesn't hold here. Enabling
some things behind a flag/pragma is OK, time will then tell if the idea is
good or not.

Just my 2c,
   S.
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