undocumented modules in OTP

[Richard Carlsson]

On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, James Hague wrote:

> On that note, are we ever going to be able to get rid of deprecated
> modules like crypto and some of the others?  And what about all the
> ancient functions in lists, for example, that are from the pre-fun
> days?
> 
> It would be nice to get rid of them at some point.  The Erlang
> distribution keeps growing in size; it would be pleasant to reverse
> the trend a bit.  The more stuff that's in there, the more daunting
> it is.

The answer to all this - I hope - is the package system for modules that
is included in R9. This is analogous to packages in Java, and will make
it possible to create a completely new set of standard modules, only
keeping the old ones for backwards compatibility. For example, "lists"
could/will be replaced by something like "erl.lang.list". (For those of
you who know Java, all old Erlang modules will simply exist in the
"empty" package; there are no problems with backwards compatibility.)

However, such a thing should be done with care, so that we don't just
move old garbage to new modules. One should take the opportunity to
clean up interfaces or even completely rewrite them, drop old baggage,
and sort functionality into suitably named modules.

	/Richard


Richard Carlsson (richardc@REDACTED)   (This space intentionally left blank.)
E-mail: Richard.Carlsson@REDACTED	WWW: http://www.csd.uu.se/~richardc/
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