[ocaml-platform] on the need and design of OCaml namespaces

[Yaron Minsky]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Christophe TROESTLER
<Christophe.Troestler at umons.ac.be> wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:41:10 +0000, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
>>
>>
>> There's one scenario which absolutely requires the ability to explicitly
>> open a particular namespace: camlp4 code generation.
>>
>> Right now, several camlp4 extensions break because they use modules from
>> the standard Pervasives library, and have no way to explicitly state that.
>> If Core.Std is opened, then compilation fails.
>>
>> The two workarounds are:
>> - hack the build system to pass -pp options to the camlp4 generator.
>> Painful.
>> - have some facility to explicitly open 'Caml_std' or 'Core_std' locally,
>> irrespective of the current module environment.
>>
>> I believe namespaces addresses the latter workaround.
>
>
> Camlp4 can insert some code to alias the standard modules needed by code
> generation at the beginning of the source files (not foolproof because a
> name needs to be generated but good enough in practice).  It would be better
> if that facility was provided by a Camlp4 module instead of needing to be
> redone by each extension.

I like this workaround a lot, and am embarrassed not to have thought
of it myself...

y