Viability of having a new top-level "Graph" module namespace

Ross Paterson ross at soi.city.ac.uk
Fri Aug 13 10:01:38 EDT 2010


On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 04:49:49PM +1000, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
> As part of an attempt at resolving the FGL vs inductive-graphs naming
> mess, one solution that Edward Kmett and I thrashed out will involve
> utilising a new top-level module namespace of Graph.* instead of using
> Data.Graph.* as currently found in FGL.  However, Don Stewart
> recommended that I ask of the collective wisdom that is the libraries
> mailing list before moving ahead with this proposal.

Graphs aren't a huge application area, and can be viewed as a data type,
so I think the question being raised here amounts to: shall we abandon
the original idea of a strictly limited number of top-level nodes in
the module hierarchy, and move to a much flatter hierarchy?  That would
obviously make for shorter module names and make it easier to avoid
name clashes, but I think there's also value in having more structure
in module names, particularly at the top level.

In this particular case, the name-clash benefit would be a one-off.
And wouldn't it be better to take over FGL and evolve it rather than
forking?


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