Jon Fairbairn wrote:
On 2004-06-14 at 15:59PDT "Iavor S. Diatchki" wrote:
according to the report there should be no connection between modules and files, and one should be able to have multiple modules in a file, and even a single module in multiple files. however none of the implementations support that, so in effect there is 1-1 correspondence between modules and files.
the reason for this is that it provides an easy way for the implementation to find the modules.
But surely it's also a significant discouragement to those who would write small modules, and therefore a Bad Thing, at least until editing and displaying multiple files is made sufficiently easy?
Question of perspective... In Pascal, Modula, Python, Clean, you name it, modules and files were always 1 - 1. Somehow this is considered more 'clean', isn't it? What's the problem with editing and displaying multiple files? There are even such systems as Matlab, where each *function* is put into a separate file, and the directory management of the underlying operating system becomes a part of the dynamic loading mechanism... [I find it a bit annoying, but I won't fight against them...]. I believe that our 21st century should finally forsake the old concept of file, as we see it now. A module is an entry in a database. Even standard text documents, because of hyper-links, multi- format, multi-part collections, etc., merit -perhaps - to be regarded not as "files", but as more structured entities... We have already separate 'interface files'... We should use more frequently multi-level editors. We know, anyway, that it is *good* to have some interaction between the editor and the compiler for the debugging... Jerzy Karczmarczuk