Heirarchical name space allocation

Adrian Hey ahey at iee.org
Wed Mar 31 08:02:29 EST 2004


On Tuesday 30 Mar 2004 10:19 am, Simon Marlow wrote:
> The idea is that community self-organisation replaces strict
> central registration of library names.  I think this is an improvement,
> but perhaps it's a cop out.  What do others think?

I think there should be some concensus about the overall structure of the
hierarchy, and that should be documented somewhere (so developers don't go
and reinvent their own slightly different names for concepts which are
already covered). Perhaps it would suffice to just do this for the top
level classifications.

In my case I have a pretty complete binding to SDL which I was thinking
of tidying up and releasing for other Haskellers. I call it HSDL :-)

But should it go in the Graphics Heirarchy, if so where? Graphics.HSDL?
SDL also covers other functionality (like audio) so I was thinking of calling
it Multimedia.HSDL, but at present there's no Multimedia top level AFAIK (but
then how would I know anyway?). Perhaps someone's already using Multi_Media 
instead? Or maybe my binding isn't necessarily unique, so perhaps
Multimedia.SDL.HSDL? SDL also has quite few bolt on extras too which
other people might write bindings for.

On reflection I'm inclined to favour a centralised system where people
book the name space they want and can also check what other libraries already
exist or are in development (might help avoid unnecessary duplication of
effort if 2 people were unknowingly working on essentially the same library).

BTW, is anybody working on a binding of FreeType by any chance? :-)

Regards
--
Adrian Hey



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