[Haskell] Re: Data.Set whishes

[Koen Claessen]

 | One could possibly argue that the right solution is to
 | put the operations in classes?

The problem is that sometimes the type of an operation on a
particular data structure is not completely according to the
general structure. There might be extra restrictions on the
type arguments for example (think of Set.map), or there
might be an extra argument required or something. Nothing
that stops you from having the same name!

Also, I think the existence of a possibly better solution
(using type classes) is no argument of having names like
mapSet and newIORef all over the place.

BTW, I realize that it is not easy to change the names of
existing libraries, even if their naming scheme is horribly
inconsistent, with Data.FiniteMap and Data.Set as good (?)
examples. But there is no reason to make a fresh start when
designing the naming scheme *standard* for (new) libraries.
Why is the naming scheme standard, described at:

http://www.haskell.org/hierarchical-modules/libraries/library-design.html

still using Haskell 1.2 naming schemes? Do people simply not
like qualified names?

 | There has from time to time been suggestions and
 | discussion about doing this, but I guess there are
 | significant obstacles -- surely, somebody must have tried
 | to clean this up?

I think Chris Okasaki did a nice job and made a good data
structure library proposal with Edison (years ago). It uses
both the qualified names trick and type classes. Why nobody
uses it (or even knows about it) is a mystery to me.

(The reason Chris gave himself is that he did not completely
populate his data structure library framework and that
people rather implement their own data structures then
instead of fitting them into his framework.)

Hereby, I call for a revival of Edison! :-)

Regards,
/Koen