Proposal: Scoping rule change

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Lennart Augustsson wrote:
> It's not often that one gets the chance to change something as
> fundamental as the scoping rules of a language.  Nevertheless, I would
> like to propose a change to Haskell's scoping rules.
> 
> The change is quite simple.  As it is, top level entities in a module
> are in the same scope as all imported entities.  I suggest that this
> is changed to that the entities from the module are in an inner scope
> and do not clash with imported identifiers.
> 
> Why?  Consider the following snippet
> 
>     module M where
>     import I
>     foo = True

I like it.

That said, how does the the fact that the scope is nested affect the 
export list? If the module scope is inside the scope of the imports, 
then this means the name  I.foo  should appear in the export list, not 
foo , because the latter is in the outermost scope.

I think the solution to these problems is to rearrange the  import 
declarations so that the syntax mirrors the scoping rules. In other 
words, I boldly propose to move the  import  declaration *before* the 
module  declaration, i.e.

    import I
    module M where
    foo = True

or even

    import I where
    module M where
    foo = True

This way, it is clear that the module M opens an inner scope and that 
the export list of M uses the names from the inner scope.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

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