RE: [Caml-list] open Module (not?) considered harmful

[Nicolas Pouillard <nicolas.pouillard@gmail.com>]

Excerpts from Nicolas Pouillard's message of Thu Nov 20 14:01:53 +0100 2008:
> 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.

Given the crowd of people wanting it, I've added a link [1] to the camlp4 wiki [2] :)

[1] http://aloxe.inria.fr/darcs/pa_import
[2] http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Camlp4_contributions

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai