2009/7/27 Jules Bean
Cale Gibbard wrote:
What do people think of this idea? Personally, it really annoys me whenever I'm forced to give explicit module qualifications, and I think this would really help. It would also subsume the DisambiguateRecordFields extension rather handily.
A disadvantage - and this is not a "No" vote, just a remark - is that when trying to debug the expression:
foo bar baz quux
if I type ":t bar" I will presumably get an ambiguity error, and I may have no easy way of working out *which* bar was actually intended in this line of code.
I don't know how much of a burden this is, but it feels like a burden to writing/debugging/understanding code.
Jules
There certainly do seem like some cases where it would help the person reading the code to qualify which module you meant, so clearly if it's not very obvious which selection of modules produces the unique way to get things to typecheck, that's not very good. Perhaps there should at least be the restriction that there must exist a chain of individual choices made where there was a unique possibility at each step. This ensures that you never have to backtrack in deciding which modules things are intended to come from. Of course, in cases where it's still not obvious, it'd still be possible to make the qualification explicit. The goal is to eliminate the need to explicitly qualify in the cases where it's entirely obvious what the qualification should be. - Cale