On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Neil Mitchell wrote:
It seems that the qualified import syntax is a bit awkward. At the moment, its common to see:
import qualified Data.Map as M import Data.Map(Map)
i.e. import a module, give it an alias (M), and put some things in the current namespace (Map).
Another way some people sometimes do it is:
import qualified Data.Map as M import Data.Map hiding (lookup)
i.e. import a module, give it an alias (M), and exclude some things from the current namespace.
Both of these require two imports, yet feel like they should require only one. It seems as though the import syntax more naturally promotes security (preventing access to some functions), rather than namespacing.
I think a better design for namespacing might be:
import Data.Map as M implicit (Map) import Data.Map as M explicit (lookup)
Why 'implicit' and 'explicit'? Do you mean something like 'include' and 'exclude'?