Name allocation

Graham Klyne GK@ninebynine.org
Tue, 03 Jun 2003 11:55:09 +0100


At 03:16 03/06/03 +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
>Alastair Reid writes:
>
>  > Maybe I need more coffee but I don't see how using relative names
>  > helps with the hard bit of the problem: conflicts between libraries
>  > written by different people.
>
>All you'd have to do is to put the two conflicting libraries into
>separate directories, than you could import them using:
>
>     import A.Foo.Bar
>     import B.Foo.Bar
>
>The reason this does not work as-of-now is the requirement of an
>absolute path in the module declaration. And relative paths would fix
>this.

This resonates with me.  I recently converted a codebase from using "flat" 
to hierarchical libraries.  I hoped that some additional libraries I use 
(HUnit, Parsec) could also be installed in the library hierachy tree, but 
that wasn't to be.  I think for exactly the reason suggested here; 
everything works fine when I set up explicit paths for the extra libraries, 
but I think that could get unwieldy for a large project.

#g



-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
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