* Jeremy Shaw: > Ugly plumbing is one thing. But the problem here is that you get a > compile time error that can *only* be fixed by modifying one of those > libraries so that it no longer defines the conflicting orphan > instance.
It seems to me that you can run into that only if you rely on an orphan instance yourself. As a result, I'm not sure if it qualifies as a strange action-at-a-distance, although I agree it's pretty bad. But I still think it's not different in a major way from any other unnecessary type incompatibility. > There is no way to hide the conflicting instances when > importing a module. (That is not an oversight, but a fundamental > design issue). In an open-source world, modifying the library is > viable option. Ahem, this is pretty much specific to Java. Everybody else frowns upon dependencies on patched libraries (although it does happen occasionally). Source code availability is not a factor, either---I'm pretty sure patching other people's code to get your job done predates the concept of source code. 8-) _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
