Re: [Caml-list] Functorizing large collections of modules

["Yaron M. Minsky" <yminsky@cs.cornell.edu>]

On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 06:24, Alain Frisch wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Francois Pottier wrote:
> 
> > > Another example of this weakness is the lack of support for namespaces.
> >
> > It is true that O'Caml has little support for resolving name conflicts
> > in a modular way, because the semantics of the module language is too
> > intimately tied with the underlying file system. I suppose a CM-like tool
> > would help, but I think this issue is separate from the one above.
> 
> 
> It seems that the new -pack feature of ocamlc/ocamlopt (see CVS) addresses
> the issue. What kind of extra support for namespace would be needed ?
> 
> Concerning the global parametrization, maybe a variation around -pack
> could solve the problem. ocamlc -pack would take a list of modules
> A1,...An (.cmo+.cmi) and a list of interfaces S1,...,Sm (.cmi) and produce
> a functor parametrized by interfaces S1,...Sm and returning a
> bundled version of A1,...,An

This seems like a plausible solution, although ideally I think the shape
of this multi-module functor should be described in a file, not just on
the command-line.  So you could have a file with a kind of dummy
functor:

library.ml

    module M(ZZp:ZZpSig) = 
    struct
      
    end

and the compiler would add the appropriate modules to the end of the
struct, in whatever order is specified on the command-line.  

One wonders, of course, whether this can easily be implemented without
tossing out separate compilation.  If not, then maybe some kind of hack
where you do a manual substitution to make this work would be the right
idea, as suggested by Francois.


y

-- 
|--------/            Yaron M. Minsky              \--------|
|--------\ http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/yminsky/ /--------|

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