On 5/11/05, Jacques Garrigue <garrigue@math.nagoya-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> Well, somebody already worked out a real solution to this problem, at
> least at the signature level:
>    http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nr/pubs/els-abstract.html

Thanks for the link, this looks like a very interesting proposal.

> The point is that once you have solved the signature level problem,
> you can solve the module level problem: you just have to duplicate your
> binding under a new name, and hide the old one with a signature
> where the type is renamed. You could have syntactic sugar for that,
> but the semantics is clear.

Right, the operations on signatures and modules do not seem to be
fundamentally different in nature.

> So my take on this problem is that the above proposal, or something
> equivalent, should be included in the language.

I fully agree. We work on some fairly large projects here that have
grown to many hundreds of modules written by different people and
often having somewhat more complicated dependencies. This sometimes
makes it difficult to express certain relationships between modules
without jumping through hoops.

Even though I think that OCaml supports "programming in the large" way
better than any other language I know, it would surely benefit from
some more improvements to the module language.  Since module systems
is one of Xavier's favourite research topics, I wonder what his point
of view is.  Any chance that we will see an even more expressive
module language in OCaml in the forseeable future?

Best regards,
Markus

--
Markus Mottl        http://www.ocaml.info        markus.mottl@gmail.com