On Fri, Oct 15, 2021 at 12:22 PM Iain Sandoe <iain_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> .. I had a question on the periods in module names (which might just mean
> I’m kinda new to the group and missed some previous design discussion)
> These have no hierarchical significance to the compiler, what problem is
> it solving to make them have disk layout hierarchy in the tooling?
>

While it's true that they don't have hierarchical significance, the name is
a list of identifiers separated by dots. The natural word separator for the
file system is a hierarchy.

Now, apart from the strict reading of the standard, we have plenty of prior
art in other languages for the translation of the word separator in the
module name to the path separator in the file system, e.g.: Perl, Python,
Java, Rust. Fortran doesn't seem to allow word separators in module names
(haven't read the entire docs for it), and Golang uses an opaque string
(intended as an URI, IIUC) as the identifier.

It also allows the filesystem usage to be smarter, instead of ending with a
flat directory with all the module files in it.