Re: Random musings on a way to organize your modules.
Philip Homburg (philip@cs.vu.nl)
Fri, 1 Apr 1994 18:22:23 GMT
In article <CnJsnv.KnF@cwi.nl> jack@cwi.nl (Jack Jansen) writes:
%One thing that has been nagging me for a long time is how we are going
%to keep different versions of modules apart, especially when python
%becomes popular and oodles of people will be putting out incompatible
%versions of all sorts of modules. This has been triggered again by two
%threads on the mailing list the last week: the one about the
%incompatible versions of 'dbm' and the other about the two
%python-interfaces to SUIT.
%
%Does anyone have any ideas on how to solve this problem? Maybe there's
%other language-communities that have solved this already...
What about a system or scheme where officially exported interfaces
have time stamps? I.e. my vapor-ware interface to Fresco would get time stamp
765224083 (the current UNIX time in seconds since 1970)
It is extremely unlikely that someone else creates or changes the
interface to a module at exactly the same time.
The thing that needs to be done for such a scheme is an extension
to import to allow specifying the version along with the module name,
and a notion of public interfaces (at the moment, every implementation of
a module is unique since it is almost impossible hide anything).
Philip Homburg