Cabal vs Haskell [sic]

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 08:01:56PM -0400, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Isaac Jones wrote:
> >Once again, the current cabal story is not different from the current
> >Haskell story.  Please stop saying that.
> 
> 1. The current Haskell story is that the dependencies of a module are 
> the set of modules identified in its import statements.

The haskell report (and hence the haskell language)  specifies
__nothing__ about how imported module names are actually mapped to code.
This has always been left up to implementations. Of course, there is an
understanding that implementations should do something sane and most
have done something akin to looking up modules in files of the same name
and -i statements, but this is not required or specified by the report.
This is why comparing haskell to cabal doesn't make sense, cabal is
meerly one proposed implementation of behavior that is undefined by
Haskell. 

You can compare Cabal's way of doing things to what specific compilers
have done, but not 'Haskell' because 'Haskell' doesn't concern itself
with these issues.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈