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

[David Brown]

Christophe TROESTLER <Christophe.Troestler at umons.ac.be> writes:

> It seems to me that the openness of namespaces is the only feature I
> have seen mentioned that modules do not have.  But is the openness of
> namespaces something considered useful?  What problem does this solves?

The simplest case is that it allows different packets to put things in
under the same hierarchy.  As an example, from Haskell:

   Data.List  from 'base'
   Data.Array from 'array'
   Data.Text  from 'text' - which is not part of the distribution

without openness, these would all need a different prefix.

Admittedly, Haskell has it much easier, since modules are very simple,
and cannot be manipulated within the language, other than the contents
of a particular file being a single module.

David