[erlang-questions] local renaming with a module attribute

[Richard O'Keefe]

On Sep 11, 2010, at 4:48 AM, Fred Hebert wrote:

> I would like to discuss the idea of adding a new module attribute allowing
> to rename a module when doing explicit external calls (local renaming, if I
> can coin the term). The attribute -rename(long_module_name, name) would
> allow the programmer to use 'name' instead of 'long_module_name' inside a
> given module.

This is pretty much the kind of thing we have with the current Java-wannabe
dotted package names, and gets into the same kind of horrible messes.

For a rather different kind of approach, which I think addresses the issues
that Fred Hebert is concerned with, and more, see

http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/childmod.htm

which I see is now four and a half years old.

The idea is to stand the problem on its head and say "why should an module
have a really_long_multipart_name in the first place?"