On 15 June 2005 13:49, Duncan Coutts wrote:
I think the bug in this case is the fact that the modules are considered to be part your program even though they are never imported (directly or indirectly) or even any modules from the same package are imported (if we take the reasonable assumption that if one module from a package becomes part of your program's module namespace then all of them do).
I agree, and I've been putting some serious thought into whether we can relax this restriction, and allow local modules to shadow package modules. Fortunately command-line linking works, because the linker links libraries lazilly. As long as we never have to use a linker that doesn't have this property, we're ok. We still have to check for real conflicts: where the package is really part of the dependencies of the program, and also shares a module name with the program. This can be checked for when compiling a module. GHCi just about copes, by virtue of linking in packages on demand. But, if you happened to require a package P and later changed the program so that it didn't need P any more but used a module name from P, you would have to restart GHCi. So, I think it's ok, just about. Cheers, Simon