Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Are you asking for the same thing as described under "Permit qualified exports" on this Haskell Prime page?
http://haskell.galois.com/cgi-bin/haskell-prime/trac.cgi/wiki/ModuleSystem
Yes - thanks for pointing out this section of the proposal. I think it would be very useful indeed, because I'm finding that the use of qualified imports in my code is essential to avoid name clashes and also helps with consistent naming for functions. It also allows more freedom in choosing value constructors and record field names without worrying about name clashes or having to prepend the name of the type to everything. As an aside, an alternative to the second point would be to make value constructors and field names local to their type so that data T = Foo{field::Int} would introduce the following: T, T^Foo, T^field -- top level names -- a global type class class (.field) a b | a -> b where (.field) :: a -> b -- a local instance instance T (.field) where (.field) Foo{field=f} = f and type inference could allow the use of plain Foo and field only when the type at that location was known to be T (eg making use of user-supplied top level type annotations) but this would require some major changes to the way type inference is done so it's probably not possible for Haskell'. Regards, Brian.