Tommy Thorn writes
| Jens' question gave my a perfect opportunity to open my a pet peeve of
| mine: the ditatorship of `Main'.
|
| In Haskell, the `main' function must reside in the `Main' module.
| Add to this that the `Main' module must reside in a `Main' file and
| you have an unfortunate consequence that you can only have one `Main'
| function in each directory. This in turn means that to have, for
| example several variants of a program, you *must* defer to either
| messing with a preprocessor or dealing with multi-directory
| compilation, not a pretty sight in either case and especially daunting
| to a beginner.
|
| In this Haskell is in contrast to most other popular programming
| language. The alternative seems quite straightforward and there are
| no technical difficulties:
|
| 1) Accept the `main' function can be put in any module, and/or
| 2) Introduce a nothing of "anonymous" modules, of which the file
| name can be anything.
|
| I'd prefer 1) alone.
|
| /Tommy
|
I heartily concur. I have always disliked the requirement for the
module-name "Main". To me, it reeks of PL/I:
main: procedure options(main);
Department of Redundancy Department
More seriously, C (I believe) established the convention of a main
routine named "main", but did not require that it be defined in a
file named "main.c". (The file name is the closest analogue to our
module name in classic C.) A Java application must have a method
named "main", but the class name is not restricted.
Cheers,
--Joe
Joseph H. Fasel, Ph.D. email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Technology Modeling and Analysis phone: +1 505 667 7158
University of California fax: +1 505 667 2960
Los Alamos National Laboratory postal: TSA-7 MS F609
Los Alamos, NM 87545
