[ocaml-platform] Followup to Leo's proposal

[Yaron Minsky]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 9:29 AM, Yaron Minsky <yminsky at janestreet.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 9:13 AM, Alain Frisch <alain.frisch at lexifi.com> wrote:
>> I support the idea of specifying implicit module opens on the command-line.
>> It is useful independently of the whole namespace discussion.  LexiFi has a
>> similar local patch; this allows us to provide a "default environment"
>> (basically, a DSL) for user code to be injected in the application on the
>> fly (the application manages the compilation itself).  I expect this could
>> also be useful to Ocisgen (I don't know if it automatically manages
>> compilation of "user code", but if it does, it probably make sense to open
>> automatically from infrastructure modules).  Of course, it is trivial to
>> rewrite the source file to add an "open ..." statement at the beginning, but
>> I don't see why the official standard library should be the only one which
>> can be used without any special directive in the source code.
>
> I agree this would be useful for many uses --- the DSL case is a
> particularly important one.  My only point is that it does not in my
> mind obviate the need to have auto-opens attached to namespaces.

Oh, and to say the obvious: you may well want to specify opens of
namespaces too (not just modules).  Indeed, if we support specifying
opens of namespaces, and namespaces can have auto-open modules, one
feature supports both use-cases.