What happened was this: 1. add some modules to a library (but forget to mention them in the cabal file), then (in the lib source dir, without cleaning/reconfiguring) "cabal install --global" (runs without complaint) 2. re-compile an application that uses the library (cabal configure && cabal build): this gave "undefined symbol" errors (for things from the added modules) (with ghc-6.12.1 on i386 debian) I still don't see why this "other-modules" is needed. Ok, I understand the technical reason that cabal does not do dependency analysis but morally, it should? Best regards - J.W.

Johannes Waldmann writes:

What happened was this: I still don't see why this "other-modules" is needed. Ok, I understand the technical reason that cabal does not do dependency analysis but morally, it should?

Why are people suddenly using the term "morally" when they mean "why doesn't this do what I think it should"? None of its definitions seem to match what you mean: http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=moral -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Dougal Stanton wrote:

'Morally' seems just the perfect word for this occasion --- concerned with right or proper conduct. In this case, potential discrepancies between the files that cabal 'knows' about when issuing different commands; or the sense of deceit when it 'appears' to work only for faults to appear further down the line.

From another angle, here's an example of explicit moral terminology applied to mathematics: http://www.cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/morality/ The mathematical sense there is slightly different from the

Beyond that, there are long established traditions in some parts of programming and mathematics for using ethical/moral terms to describe qualities that go beyond just technical requirements or correctness; this program should do the Right Thing, that bit of code is "evil", and so on. Actually defining this "moral sense" is difficult, though, and it varies somewhat from one person to another, but there seems to be at least some common, shared understanding. It's about "should" and "proper" instead of "is" or "must". Personally, I know I've written code that I'd feel guilty about even if it worked perfectly and no one else ever saw it--what else would you call that feeling? programming sense, I think, but there seems to be some crossover. For instance, I've gotten the impression that something like a mathematical "moral sense" underlies much of the interest in programming language semantics, FRP, and dependently-typed languages, though I don't know if the people involved would necessarily call it that. - C.

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

Why are people suddenly using the term "morally" when they mean "why doesn't this do what I think it should"? None of its definitions seem to match what you mean:

The usage on this thread seems a bit nonstandard, but I'm assuming it's based off the more general idiom of things being "morally equivalent"--- that is, things which *should* be equal because we mean for them to be (regardless of what a particular model (e.g., a programming language) says). In other words, with the right set of beliefs (i.e., "moral" beliefs, or the "right" religion) they are indeed equal, but the world is violating those beliefs somehow. The implication being that the world (model, PL,...) should be changed, rather than the beliefs. -- Live well, ~wren