Removing Qualified Names in Modular Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces a module system for functional languages that removes qualified names by importing only necessary declarations, improving modularity and potentially reducing memory usage.

Contribution

It proposes the module weakening scheme, enabling minimal import of declarations, as an alternative to qualified names in module systems.

Findings

The module weakening scheme effectively reduces memory overhead.

The approach simplifies module interactions by localizing declarations.

A practical module system for functional languages is demonstrated.

Abstract

Although the notion of qualified names is popular in module systems, it causes severe complications. In this paper, we propose an alternative to qualified names. The key idea is to import the declarations in other modules to the current module before they are used. In this way, all the declarations can be accessed locally. However, this approach is not efficient in memory usage. Our contribution is the {\it module weakening} scheme which allows us to import the minimal parts. As an example of this approach, we propose a module system for functional languages.