Excerpts from David Allsopp's message of Thu Nov 20 11:29:44 UTC 2008: > On 20 November 2008 10:49, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > > On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:33:03AM +0000, Richard Jones wrote: > > > Encouraging developers to open modules is also usually a bad idea, > > > except in very limited circumstances (hello Printf). > > > > Why? You and others failed me to convince of this. Or, better, I'm > > sure there are problems with that, but they just show deficiencies > > inherited from other parts of the language. > > Consider > > open Array;; > open List;; > > (* Hundreds of lines of code *) > > length [];;
That's not a good example, because I consider the shadowing above as an ambiguity on certain identifiers. Don't confuse short names and ambiguous names. > The code is now is brittle in terms of the order of the open statements at > the top of the file and will fail to compile if they're swapped. Of course, > if you don't care about that kind of subtle refactoring error then open is > completely fine. Personally, I find that kind of brittleness irritating - > and it also has the potential to waste a huge amount of time if you have to > refactor the code. > > Whether you find code less readable with or without module names is of > course a matter taste and IIRC, OCaml 3.11 .annot files contain the > necessary information to expand them so there could be a nice editor plugin > to expand or remove module paths... > > > > The most straightforward solution to this problem to me looks like > > > providing a syntax equivalent like "from Module import foo, bar" > > > which selectively imports only some identifiers from a given module. > > Which, for values only, is of course a trivial camlp4 extension... and could > be generalised to include type declarations and so on with only a little > more work. The .NET languages have a syntax for selectively importing > classes from a namespace rather than the entire namespace (and it's > different from Java's in that you can rename the class while you do it). I have a trivial camlp4 extension for that actually if someone is interested, feel free to ask. -- Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
