[Haskell-cafe] Proposal: TypeDirectedNameResolution

[Evan Laforge]

One issue I have which I haven't seen anyone mention is that it's not
useful with qualified names, by which I mean always importing
qualified.  Of course if you have no problem always using qualified
names, the problem this extension is solving doesn't exist.  Though I
do like short names I'm not terribly bothered by writing Map.map and
List.map.  Most calls in a module are within the module after all,
which is as it should be in most cases.  So this extension would do
nothing for me.

I like the explicitness of qualified names, and I find it hard to read
someone's module when they call some function that comes somewhere out
of a list of 15 imports at the top, and this extension would make it
even harder to find the definition of the function... though tags
would narrow down the search a lot.  But with modules, often the
prepended module name is all the information I need at the moment.

On the other hand, I do acknowledge that I'm pretty used to seeing x.y
in an OO language and often don't mind that I need to know the type of
'x' and maybe even find the constructor call to know where to look for
'y'.  So maybe it's not that big of a deal.