I agree that checking interface/implementation of modules could be
improved.

For projects that I've worked on that have huge variant types, I have
typically placed the variants in a module by themselves with no .mli file. 
This technique hasn't worked too well for me in practice and is still
annoying for the smaller variants. 

A reasonable modification to the language would allow a module expression
to not include type definitions when they are defined in the module type
and include their type information. 

This would mean that

  module X : sig type t = int end = struct end

would be accepted, but

  module X : sig type t end = struct end

would be rejected because the abstract field 't' is required but missing.


Would this proposal address all the issues you had in mind?

Patrick Doane

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Chris Hecker wrote:

> 
> > There are only two options. [And non-local classes are _always_ extern]
> > This is not so in Ocaml: you may wish to provide access to a component
> > such as a function with a type more constrained than the actual
> > implementation.
> 
> Yes yes yes, I know this.  I'm saying I understand why I need to type
> stuff if there's a difference betwen the .ml and .mli versions (hiding
> stuff, restricting stuff, abstracting stuff), and that's fine.  I'm
> asking why I need to retype stuff if it's identical.  Check out some
> of the source code in the compiler, or any ocaml project I've seen
> (the ICFP winners, whatever).  There are tons of really huge variants
> that are just duplicated in mli and ml.  That seems bad, for the same
> reason that typing a C++ function declaration 2 times is bad.
> 
> Chris
> 
> 
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