[m-dev.] Re: [mercury-users] Module qualification of common operators (was RE: [m-rev.] Updated posix patch)

Zoltan Somogyi zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Tue Jul 17 14:49:34 AEST 2001


On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 10:20:44PM +1000, Peter Schachte wrote:
> I agree.  I find the module prefix often makes the code harder to read.  I
> often find the intended meaning is is more quickly seen without the extra
> text.  

As some who looks at other people's code reasonably often, I find that the
module qualifiers help me significantly. They make it easy to see what data
structures the code is working with, without requiring me to look at the data
structure declarations, which are usually a fair way from the code.

I think this is in large part an original writer vs maintainer issue. Module
qualifications may be clutter for the original writer of the code, but they are
useful signal to a maintainer. Given that even original writers turn into
maintainers sooner or later, I think we should help maintainers first.

Zoltan.
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