[M3devel] license..

[hendrik at topoi.pooq.com]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 03:20:47PM +0000, Jay wrote:
>  
> I'm not against licensing and all, but I dislike big banners *everywhere*, in every file.
> One little file per directory I guess ok, still kind of obnoxious.
> It's not up to me obviously, it's up to the original author.
> We have it far from the worst, I realize. I have seen some humungous per-file banners.
> The banners are often the vast majority of the file...
> (all the more reason to smush files together :) )

One of the things I hate about Eiffel is that every class has to be in 
its own file.

Java is almost as bad.  It doesn't formally have this restriction, but 
except for a few very local classes, you pretty well have to follow it 
anyway.

I really like the way you can put multiple classes into one file in 
Modula 3.  Now if I could only have modules within modules too, or at 
least multiple modules per file, I'd be happy.

The way you want break a program up into files -- or don't -- depends on 
pragmatics, such as the tools you are comfortable with in the operating 
environment, and not on the way you want to express your program in your 
programming language.  I'm in favour of a greater disconnect between 
syntactic struture and division into files.

Huge copyright banners are an excellent example of how pragmatics affect 
programming.

-- hendrik