On 5/3/05, S. Alexander Jacobson <alex <at> alexjacobson.com> wrote:
Problem: We need a way to simplify module imports.
Problem details:
* Hierarchical module names are getting really long (including a functional area, a package name, and a module name).
* People typically import multiple modules from areas close to each other in the hierarchical module namespace (especially in the case of intra-package imports).
* Long module names are required even for non-exposed modules because a program may contain only one module with a given name (regardless of its visibility).
Idea: Allow module relative imports in a manner that does not break any existing code.
This would be really nice, but I'm not sure I like the way you propose to do it. Those bare dots don't look very nice to me, and I really don't like the idea of having to count them... I'm not even sure I like the idea of imports relative to the current module. I almost want "import Text.HaXML.XML.{Types,Escape,Pretty}", but not quite. And that would not be nice for qualified imports, anyway. Maybe something like from Text.HaXML.XML import (Types, Escape, Pretty) would be nice. -- Sam