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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Enumeration literal visibility and use type
Date: 1998/05/27
Message-ID: <dewar.896294335@merv>#1/1
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Date: 1998-05-27T00:00:00+00:00
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John McCabe says

<<And explicit module qualifiers on enumeration literals don't?
>>

If you think that explicit module qualifiers on identifiers are ugly, then
you definitely want to consider using a real "use" package clause.

Basically what is going on with use type is that there are a significant
number of people who don't mind writing, or even prefer to write:

   package_name.identifier;

and of course enumeration literals are just a special case of identifiers.
But they draw the line at

   package_name."+" (x,y);

Basically the issue here is that people want to know the package where
something comes from at a glance, and hence don't like use package clauses,
but their desire to see the package where something comes from at a glance
is not strong enough to overcome their disgust at having to go to the ugly
prefix notation for binary operators. It's just a matter of trading off
syntactic ugliness vs explicit qualification.

I always have trouble understanding this distinction, but I *SURELY* cannot
understand that someone would not mind writing:


	x := red;

where red is an enuemration literal, but would not want to write

        x := colorget;

where colorget is some other function than an enumeration literal. To 
want to qualify in the second case:

        x := pkg.colorget;

but to object to

        x := pkg.red;

seems very inconsistent to me. I do understand the use type argument, but
surely to make it apply to enumeration literals and not other primitive
operations would be very odd indeed.