[Haskell-cafe] Re: 2 modules in one file

On 2008-08-30, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

On 2008 Aug 30, at 4:22, Aaron Denney wrote:

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On 2008-08-27, Henrik Nilsson wrote:

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And there are also potential issues with not every legal module name being a legal file name across all possible file systems.

I find this unconvincing. Broken file systems need to be fixed.

Language people trying to impose constraints on filesystems is the tail wagging the dog.

I'd say it's just the opposite. The purpose of a filesystem is to hold user data, in ways convenient to the user, which means dictating a usable interface. Dictating the implementation would be closer to tail wagging the dog, though even that's not quite the right metaphor -- it's just a layering violation. The user is in this case GHC or other compiler adopting the suggestion in the Hierarchical modules extension. Just as non-hierarchical file systems have long been considered broken, I think it's safe to now declare that one that doesn't support unicode in some fashion, even if only a userland convention of using UTF-8, is indeed less usable, and hence broken. -- Aaron Denney -><-