Heirarchical name space allocation

Simon Marlow simonmar at microsoft.com
Tue Mar 30 10:19:32 EST 2004


 
> Who's in charge of allocating names in the hierarchical
> modules for publicly released libraries these days?
> 
> This page lists (some) allocated names..
>   http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/libraries/layout.html
> 
> But I can think of a few that aren't listed there.
> What's the policy?
> Is there a master reference or register somewhere?

At one stage we thought that having a single global registry for names
was the way to go.  Now I think that a free-for-all, with good package
management tools, is probably better.

Names and hierarchy locations will still be discussed on this list, but
anyone is free to publish a library using any names in the hierarchy
they please.  If there is overlap, then the compiler should prevent you
from using two overlapping packages at the same time.  In fact, there's
one good reason for allowing overlap: versioning of libraries.

Of course, if your library uses names that are consistent with the
general policy, then there's a greater chance that your library will be
included in future "collections" of libraries, bundled with compilers,
and so on.  The idea is that community self-organisation replaces strict
central registration of library names.  I think this is an improvement,
but perhaps it's a cop out.  What do others think?

Cheers,
	Simon


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