Re: Re: hierarchical packaging (was: Java API)

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Yann LeCun wrote:

> Hey Ralf,
>
> you can already do:
>
> (package mystuff
>  (private print)
>  (dm print (dummy . arg) '())
>
>  (de the (rest) (of your))
>  (de code (goes) (here) (print some debugging info))
> )

Thanks! I have to admit that I misunderstood what 'package'
does when I looked at it the first time. That indeed helps
with the name clash problem. I wonder why package isn't used
anywhere in the lush libraries.


> What else do you need?

Package helps with my most pressing concerns. But since you
asked, let me add a few suggestions for possible improvements:

o You want to document the public interface a module provides.
   So using package you should need to state what you want to
   be public not what you want be private. The syntax could
   look like this:
   (package <package-name>
            (<symbol1> ... <symboln>) ;; public defs

     (de there (goes) (your-code))
     ...
   )

o Another purpose of explicit import statements is that they
   more specifically document module depencies. Hence I still
   would like to use something like

   (import (read-lines write-lines) from "libc/shell")

   For now an implementation of 'import' could just verify
   that the listed symbols are indeed defined in the module to be
   loaded. If we ever get to implement a more flexible libload
   mechanism, then we could change the semantics of import to the
   intended selective import later.

Ralf


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