[PRL] annoying types ARGH!

[Felix S Klock II]

On May 12, 2005, at 10:00 PM, David Herman wrote:


>>> long list of things I'd change about OCaml.  Starting with  
>>> decoupling
>>> the module system from the file system.  ARGH.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Yeap, it's a crime. And mzscheme is only an epsilon better in this  
>> regard.
>>
>>
>
> In what way is mzscheme any better? If you say include.ss I'm going  
> to cry.
>

Well, I don't know if this is what Matthias was referring to, and I  
don't know if Ocaml lets you do this or not, but . . .

in MzScheme you can at least evaluate module expressions at the top- 
level, and they then get bound to normal identifiers in the top-level  
environment.

So one can put a bunch of modules into a single file; after loading  
that file, the top-level environment has those modules in it.   
hurrah, we've somewhat decoupled the module system from the file system.

(Of course, employing this coding pattern makes it more difficult to  
track down where the module code actually resides.)

I do this a fair amount when I "playing" with toy examples or scratch  
work.  Not when I actually want to write "real" code though.

-Felix

p.s. also, PLaneT is somewhat-decoupled from the file-system, no?  (I  
say somewhat since there is that whole planet cache thing. . .)