[Caml-list] Why are modules handled differently by the interpreter and the compiler

[Alain Coste <alaincoste@club-internet.fr>]

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Hello,
Back to a problem which I have always found annoying in OCaml. I hoped the version 4.0 would solve it, but it seams nothing changed..
While developping a project, It's interesting to use the interpreter (for test, debugging) AND the compiler (to have program run faster when everything goes wright).
Now, when the project is divided in several modules, each module being a structure written in a .ml file (with possibly a signature in a .mli file), you can't simply use the interpreter and the compiler on the same files.
The interpreter loads the modules with their names (say M), and you can refer to its identifiers with M.foo, in the standard way.
The compiler adds one level of "modularity", as it encapsulates the contents of the file with "module M ...end". So now its identiifers should be referenced as M.M.foo !!
I found two possible work-arounds to this :
   - comment out all my top-level decarations of module before compiling the files
            needs to be undone and redone every time I want to reuse the interpreter for testing after a change in the the program
   - copy all the files in one file and compile this unique file
            this process is easy to automatize, but I loose the advantages of separate compilation

Can somebody explain the rationale behind this behavior. Or, if this is only for historical and compatibility reasons, could it be possible to have an option "-please_don't_encapsulate" (or something shorter...) for the compiler ?

Alain Coste

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