Malcolm Wallace
PS: Is it correct that -- except for the new functionality in symbols being annotated with package as well as module name -- all of this is just a matter of convenience/syntactic sugar? (Which would explain the volume of the discussion :-)
For the current proposal, yes.
Then I'm not convinced it is worth introducing new import syntax. I think 90% of the cases of ambiguity should be resolved globally for the project, i.e. by compiler switches (typically in .cabal, Makefile, or similar). These cases include using newer versions of standard packages, regression testing for library versions, or alternative implementations. For the remaining (and bear in mind that nobody have put forward anything but hypothetical examples yet), I think a proxy module is sufficient as a solution. This is necessary where one program needs to simultaneously use modules with the same hierarchical name from different packages. And the advantage of making this hurt a bit, is that it puts pressure on different-functionality modules to populate different locations in the hierarchical namespace - the pain here is a feature, not a bug. (Please enlighten me if I'm missing some important cases here.) -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants