Mauro, On Tuesday, January 13, 2015 at 1:45:36 PM UTC-8, Mauro wrote: > > > I don't think it is good practice to add unrelated methods to generic > functions in Base. A guide-line could be to check whether your methods > matches up with the help text, if so, add it to Base.count otherwise > not. If not, either give it a different name or do not export it, so > the user has to fully qualify it MyMod.count. >
I generally agree with this sentiment, but my libertarian core rebels against the notion that the writer of the software that I use gets to decide the meaning of the words that are used as identifiers of functions and such. Many common concepts, such as length, angle, domain,… will eventually be taken and therefore unavailable to future software developers. (Of course I realize that they are still available as qualified names.) More importantly, since the possibility of writing totally unrelated methods for a given generic function cannot be eliminated, I believe that even the double import of a generic function resulting in merged methods should be allowed. It would provide for uniformity, as even this restriction can be easily bypassed by defining a dummy generic function in the environment that "uses" two modules that export methods for this function. Not allowing repeated imports does not accomplish anything except that it gets in the way. Petr > it. >
