Re: package proposal

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Roberto Ierusalimschy wrote:

> > why shouldn't independently-distributed modules providing related
> > functionality be grouped into a package (and even require one another)?
>
> What about "A *package* is a collection of interrelated modules"?

How about allowing modules to be packages? You already talk about 
hierarchically defined modules in the spec.

> > The "one file = one module" rule is arbitrary and wrong. Most
> > languages with a decent module system don't have it.
>
> Python has it hardcoded. Perl allows a package to be defined in several
> files, but there is no standard way to load such a package. (I am not
> sure whether they qualify as "languages with a decent module system",
> but there are few complains about their module systems.) In Lua, too,
> you will be able to spread a module through several files (and even to
> define several modules in one file), but there is no standard way to
> import such modules.

I agree that Python and Perl are not obviously "languages with decent 
module systems". I suppose I'm not against a module needing to be loaded 
from a single file, I'm just against it being restricted to a single 
file. Having a file that you load in order to load the module is fine 
(and then it's up to that file how it gets the other pieces).

> > I think, all in all, this proposal suffers from feature bloat. [...]
> > The CPAN model might offer some lessons here:
>
> Which feature in this proposal are not present in Perl? (Ok, the stuff
> about C modules and preloaded modules are not present in Perl, but Perl
> almost do not use C modules.) Which specific feature do you think we
> should remove?

Actually, on a second reading, it seems that most of the detail in the 
Lua proposal is there because it can be, because Lua is already more 
regular than Perl. The irregularities seem mostly to do with dealing 
with compiled code, which, as you say, Perl doesn't have to worry about 
so much; and it IS useful to be able to load compiled or linked code 
directly without needing a Lua header (or is it? if you required a Lua 
header for all compiled or linked code, would this make the proposal 
simpler?).

There's also one small thing, the way you allow | or ; as equivalent 
separators. This is logical but confusing. There are enough other places 
in Lua with this sort of confusion (mostly for syntactic sugar reasons); 
adding further syntactic alternatives should be avoided.

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