[ocaml-platform] Followup to Leo's proposal

[Alain Frisch]

On 03/13/2013 01:56 PM, Yaron Minsky wrote:
> I would have thought it more natural for N#M
> to translate to "let open namespace N in M"

Well, "let open namespace N in M" does not force M to be found in 
namespace N (except if we get a nice warning for unused namespace opens 
and you turn it into an error :-)).

I was thinking that the "N#..." notation would not be allowed for 
accessing "toplevel values" in namespace N (i.e. values in module 
automatically opened in N).  Same for types.  By the way, note that "N # 
x" is already a syntactically valid (but always ill-typed) expression.
To be coherent with that, we should similarly disallow N#M to refer to a 
sub-module M of an automatically opened module.  I'd strongly prefer, 
even if automatic open is supported, that N#M can only refer to a 
compilation unit M.

So I wouldn't find it shocking if "open namespace N" brought some more 
values/types/modules in scope (by automatically opening some modules), 
but those components could not be accessing simply with the N#... 
notation (one would have to write something like N#Std.x).


Alain