
19 Feb
2002
19 Feb
'02
6:24 p.m.
It seems to me that it might be very useful for a module to export the pattern matching operators for a datatype without exporting the constructors. Suppose we have data A = X {a::Int, b::Float} And we want to maintain the invariant that b is a floating-point representation of a. So normally we would have to use a completely abstract datatype, and provide constructors and destructors. But in this case, it would actually make sense to provide the pattern-matching operator X, but not the data constructor X. So I think it would be good to separate these in the module export syntax. Note: You can get this with views, but it's more clunky that way. David Feuer