On Mon, Dec 19, 2016 at 2:22 PM, MarLinn via Haskell-Cafe < haskell-cafe@haskell.org> wrote: There's no good reason to force the language to adhere to something as arbitrary or restricted as a traditional filesystem hierarchy. "Modules" are a much more general concept than files on a disk, and it would be a mistake to over-specify them.
It is already the case that Haskell identifiers (including module names) are case sensitive, and some popular file systems are not, making tying to a file system dodgy. In attempt to solve a similar problem, SGML introduced the idea of "entities". SGML chunks are stored as "entities" managed by an "entity manager" which might or might not be some sort of file system. OASIS introduced the idea of "catalogs" which allow entity names to be mapped in various ways. I don't see any reason why, for example, a Haskell compiler couldn't map Foo.Bar.Ugh to Foo.zip(Bar/Ugh.hs) if so directed.