Heirarchical name space allocation

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

Am Montag, 5. April 2004 10:49 schrieben Sie:
> Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> > Am Sonntag, 4. April 2004 16:51 schrieb Sven Panne:
> > > I have a small brain and therefore I like simple rules like "Every
> > > module Foo simply re-exports the modules Foo.*". :-)
> >
> > I've never used this strategy.  In my opinion, it makes much sense if a
> > module Foo is about general foo things whereas its submodules are about
> > more specific things.
>
> That's no contradiction to my rule, e.g. Graphics.Rendering.OpenGL is about
> *all* OpenGL stuff, while Graphics.Rendering.OpenGL.GL is about GL and
> Graphics.Rendering.OpenGL.GLU is about GLU.

I think, we mean different things.  You talk about Foo containing *all* foo 
stuff whereas I talk about Foo containing the *basic* foo stuff or suff for 
general foos or whatever.

One example is a hierarchy for graph handling code, I used lately. The module 
<prefix>.Graph contains code for directed graphs, <prefix>.Graph.Acyclic 
contains a type for the special case of acyclic graphs, etc.

Another example are modules about URIs,  which I'm currently developing.  
<prefix>.URI contains the URI type, <prefix>.URI.Scheme contains a type for 
URI schemes, <prefix>.URI.Hierarchical provides support for the special case 
of hierarchical URIs and so on.

> Perhaps I should explain a little bit more what IMHO is a "good use" of the
> hierarchical structure:
>
>   * "collector" modules: These are a necessity for larger APIs, otherwise
> you can easily have dozens of closely related imports. Nobody argued
> against this use, IIRC, and we already have a lot of examples of it.

I don't know if dozens of closely related imports are such a bad thing.  The 
problem with your approach is that it doesn't seem to work if certain names 
are defined in several of the collected modules.  For example, I cannot see 
how you would create a DData collector module.  Another problem I see is that 
you cannot use the module Foo for general things (see above) which is 
sometimes useful.

> [...]

> Cheers,
>     S.

Wolfgang