[Haskell-cafe] Qualified import syntax badly designed (?)

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

It seems that the qualified import syntax is a bit awkward. At the
moment, its common to see:

import qualified Data.Map as M
import Data.Map(Map)

i.e. import a module, give it an alias (M), and put some things in the
current namespace (Map).

Another way some people sometimes do it is:

import qualified Data.Map as M
import Data.Map hiding (lookup)

i.e. import a module, give it an alias (M), and exclude some things
from the current namespace.

Both of these require two imports, yet feel like they should require
only one. It seems as though the import syntax more naturally promotes
security (preventing access to some functions), rather than
namespacing.

I think a better design for namespacing might be:

import Data.Map as M implicit (Map)
import Data.Map as M explicit (lookup)

If this was the design, I'm not sure either qualified or hiding would
be necessary for namespacing. You'd get module names aligning up in
the same column after the import rather than being broken up with
qualified. You'd only need one import of a module for most purposes.
The hiding keyword might still be nice for lambdabot style
applications, but that is probably a secondary concern, and better
handled in other ways.

Thoughts? Is this design flawed in some way? Does the existing design
have some compelling benefit I've overlooked?

Thanks

Neil