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

[Daniel Bünzli]

Le lundi, 25 février 2013 à 20:16, Yaron Minsky a écrit :
> You might be right, but I think there's a deep issue here that
> shouldn't be dismissed so lightly.  

I don't dismiss it. I would prefer it to be solved with already existing concepts.  

> The argument is that modules are
> simply too powerful to be used as the complete solution to namespace
> management.  

In which sense ? Why is too powerful ? What does powerful mean in that particular case ? That is I think what prevents me from understanding the need for namespaces.

> Deciding that the only principled approach is to always
> pick the most powerful, most general purpose primitive is attractive,
> but not always sane...

That's not the way I reason, the principle I have here is to try, *if pratical*, to use existing concepts rather than pile new ones in the language. Now I would really like to be convinced that we need namespaces it's just that so far the arguments presented all seem to revolve around "module aliasing"/"pack" do the job but it doesn't because of implementation issues.  

Daniel