Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
So instead of just taking this simple solution, the wiki proposal is instead destroying the beauty of the per-package namespace idea by incorporating into it the existing shared namespaces with their attendant problems, instead of just letting the existing messy system die a natural death through the syntactic isolation I proposed.
Brian,
I think your proposal may be clearer to you than to everyone else. It's always hard to reconstruct a detailed proposal by reading long email threads.
Suggestion: if you feel strongly about this, why not start a Wiki page (you can link to it from the current one) to describe the design you propose, at a comparable level of detail?
Incidentally, compatibility with Cabal is a significant goal.
Hi Simon - Actually re-reading my post I realised I may have sounded a bit negative about the hard work you'd done to collate the various responses to form the wiki proposal - my apologies. I've followed your suggestion and made a separate page at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GhcPackagesAlternativeProposal (linked from the bottom of the existing page)which will hopefully make my ideas a lot clearer. I've also changed my proposed syntax so that it is 100% backwards compatible (no new keywords) with the existing module system and language (and existing package naming rules). Regards, Brian. -- Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose. Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past, congealed in the present in unthought forms, strive mightily unseen to destroy us. http://www.metamilk.com