Module System

[Henrik Nilsson]

Dear all,

Simon M. wrote:

 > This is not the first time that someone has made the same suggestion
 > as Georg, and for good reasons: there's a lack of modularity in the
 > current design, such that renaming the root of a module hierarchy
 > requires editing every single source file in the hierarchy.

Point taken. (I did say that Georg's proposal had its merits, and this
is basically what I meant.)

 > I don't have anything concrete to say (sorry!) except that I'm not
 > convinced that the language spec should require a module to declare
 > its full name in the source code any more.

Personally, I like the fact that the module names are explicitly there,
but again, yes I can certainly see that it can be inconvenient.

But as always, how much "refactoring support" should there be in
the language, and what does properly belong in tools?

Anyway, I'm not fundamentally opposed to more flexible imports,
I'm only worried about too many environmental dependencies unnecessarily
infiltrating the language spec.

As long as a discussion would be in terms of a hierarchical
module name space (or some other language-centred notion like
that), I have no objects to the discussion as such.

 > I certainly don't believe that
 > the language spec should say anything at all about file systems, but
 > it should be open to the possibility that "unspecified
 > implementation-dependent behaviour" might affect how module
 > definitions are paired with import declarations.

Yes, that might be necessary in the end.

Best,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
The University of Nottingham
nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk


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