Heirarchical name space allocation

[Malcolm Wallace]

Adrian Hey <ahey at iee.org> writes:

> But should it go in the Graphics Heirarchy, if so where? Graphics.HSDL?
> Or maybe my binding isn't necessarily unique, so
> perhaps Multimedia.SDL.HSDL?

In general, the package name (e.g. HSDL) does not need to be part of
the hierarchical name (e.g. Multimedia.SDL is quite sufficient).
This is especially the case when the package is a binding to
some external library, which already has its own arbitrary name
(e.g. OpenGL, GTK, SDL), and where there is usually only one plain
and obvious way (more or less :-) to bind the signatures.

However, it /is/ a good idea to include the package name as part of
the hierarchical name when (a) the functionality is implemented all or
primarily in Haskell; and (b) there clearly exist different approaches
to doing the same job.  Examples of this are parser combinators,
pretty-printers, XML transformation etc.

> but at present there's no Multimedia top level
> AFAIK (but then how would I know anyway?).

This list is the primary forum for the community to discuss and
allocate names.  So you are doing the right thing by posting a
proposal here, with alternatives, and asking for opinions.

Regards,
    Malcolm