Abstract

The ease of understanding, maintaining, and developing a large program depends crucially on how it is divided up into modules. The possible ways a program can be divided are constrained by the available modular programming facilities ("module system") of the programming language being used. Experience with the Standard-ML module system has shown the usefulness of functions mapping modules to modules and modules with module subcomponents. For example, functions over modules permit abstract data types (ADTs) to be parameterized by other ADTs, and submodules permit modules to be organized hierarchically. Module systems with such facilities are called higher-order, by analogy with higher-order functions. Previous higher-order module systems can be classified as either opaque or transparent. Opaque systems totally obscure information about the identity of type components of modules, often resulting in overly abstract types. This loss of type identities precludes most interesting uses of hi...

Citations