On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 04:49:49PM +1000, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
As part of an attempt at resolving the FGL vs inductive-graphs naming mess, one solution that Edward Kmett and I thrashed out will involve utilising a new top-level module namespace of Graph.* instead of using Data.Graph.* as currently found in FGL. However, Don Stewart recommended that I ask of the collective wisdom that is the libraries mailing list before moving ahead with this proposal.
Graphs aren't a huge application area, and can be viewed as a data type, so I think the question being raised here amounts to: shall we abandon the original idea of a strictly limited number of top-level nodes in the module hierarchy, and move to a much flatter hierarchy? That would obviously make for shorter module names and make it easier to avoid name clashes, but I think there's also value in having more structure in module names, particularly at the top level. In this particular case, the name-clash benefit would be a one-off. And wouldn't it be better to take over FGL and evolve it rather than forking?