Jon Fairbairn wrote:
On 2004-06-14 at 15:59PDT "Iavor S. Diatchki" wrote:
according to the report there should be no connection
between modules and files, and one should be able to have
multiple modules in a file, and even a single module in
multiple files. however none of the implementations
support that, so in effect there is 1-1 correspondence
between modules and files.
the reason for this is that it provides an easy way for
the implementation to find the modules.
But surely it's also a significant discouragement to those
who would write small modules, and therefore a Bad Thing, at
least until editing and displaying multiple files is made
sufficiently easy?
Question of perspective... In Pascal, Modula, Python, Clean,
you name it, modules and files were always 1 - 1. Somehow
this is considered more 'clean', isn't it? What's the
problem with editing and displaying multiple files?
There are even such systems as Matlab, where each *function*
is put into a separate file, and the directory management
of the underlying operating system becomes a part of the dynamic
loading mechanism... [I find it a bit annoying, but I won't
fight against them...].
I believe that our 21st century should finally forsake the old
concept of file, as we see it now. A module is an entry in a
database.
Even standard text documents, because of hyper-links, multi-
format, multi-part collections, etc., merit -perhaps - to be
regarded not as "files", but as more structured entities...
We have already separate 'interface files'...
We should use more frequently multi-level editors. We know,
anyway, that it is *good* to have some interaction between
the editor and the compiler for the debugging...
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
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