Packages in Erlang: new documentation

[Richard Carlsson]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, WILLIAMS Dominic wrote:

> While I am at it, and before the Erlang community commits to the
> concept of packages, I would like to argue in favour of Eiffel's
> concept of a posteriori name conflict resolution by renaming.
>
> The idea is that instead of conservatively putting every name into a
> package (which is just extra work, and only reduces the probability of
> conflict without eliminating it entirely), you can (locally) rename an
> existing module with which you have a name conflict, and use it under
> another name (an alias, if you will) in your own code (or in a
> specific module, or application).

Yes, but it does not work in Erlang, because there your _cannot_
rename a module, since you cannot know if someone is going to
call it via apply(M, F, [...]) or spawn(M, F, [...]). It is not
possible to know in general what the M:s are, or even to which
M the caller is actually referring (the first M, or the later added
one that was renamed?)

	/Richard


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