The meaning of Cabal+Haskell

[Simon Marlow]

On 26 April 2005 04:55, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Apr 2005, John Meacham wrote:
>> 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. [...]
>> This is why comparing haskell to cabal doesn't make sense, cabal is
>> meerly one proposed implementation of behavior that is undefined by
>> Haskell.
> 
> That's what I thought too!  But, Malcolm Wallace and Simon Marlow
> corrected me a few posts back and they are the authors of the spec.
> They say that, like Haskell, Cabal actually specifies __nothing__
> about how imported module names are mapped to code either.
> 
>    Me: My objection to Cabal is that it in fact DOES determine the
>    referent of an import statement (build-depends).
> 
>    Malcolm: I can see why you might object, if that were the case, but
>    Cabal does NOT in fact determine the referent!  Cabal is just a
>    convenient way of grouping together the denotational /interface/ of
>    a large bunch of modules.  The implementations of those modules can
>    be replaced at any time, provided they still meet the interface.
>
>    Me: The Cabal spec says "build-depends: [...] a list of packages
>    [..] needed to build this one"
> 
>    Malcolm: "needed to build" tells me which interfaces must be
>    available at compile-time, no more and no less.
> 
>    Simon: Build-depends uses the source-code notion of interface, not
>    the object code.  So, build-depends has the same meaning for all
> compilers. 

Malcolm is pointing out that it's possible to substitute object code for
a module as long as the replacement supports the same interface.  The
definition of "interface" in this case is compiler-dependent, so I think
we should separate this observation from the discussion at hand - it's
an extra complication (IMHO).

You're interested in what the meaning of Cabal+Haskell is.  Here's a
succinct interpretation of the relationship:

  Haskell: "A program consists of a set of modules."

  Cabal+Haskell: "A program consists of a set of modules.
                  I'm going to provide a way to construct
                  that set of modules, by combining sets of modules
                  called packages."

Cheers,
	Simon