Malcolm Wallace
Proposal 1 ---------- Introduce nested namespaces for modules. The key concept here is to map the module namespace into a hierarchical directory-like structure. * The use of qualified imports becomes more verbose: for instance [...] instance, either the fully-qualified or abbreviated-qualified names Text.Xml.Parse.element Parse.element would be accepted and have the same referent, but a partial qualification like Xml.Parse.element would not be accepted.
Why not? Perhaps one could have a warning/error if there are multiple "Parse" modules?
* Another consequence of using the dot as the module namespace separator is that it steals one extremely rare construction from Haskell'98: [...] No-one so far thinks this is any great loss, and if you really want to say the latter, you still can by simply inserting spaces: A.B . C.D
Personally, I'm not overly enthusiastic about using (.) for function composition - but I guess e.g the degrees sign was ruled out since it's not in (7bit) ASCII - and I think it should require spaces anyway, in order to differentiate it from its other uses.
Proposal 2 ---------- Adopt a standardised namespace layout to help those looking for or writing libraries, and a "Std" namespace prefix for genuinely standard libraries. (These are two different things.)
Sounds good! -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants