[M3devel] license..

[Henning Thielemann]

On Thu, 24 Jan 2008 hendrik at topoi.pooq.com wrote:

> 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.

But you should not do so, because qualification gives more natural names
if the module name reflects the name of its main type. In anticipation of
generic modules it is also a good idea to call the main type T. I found it
good style, also in other programming languages, to setup one module per
(important) data type. Sooner or later there are enough functions in the
module to justify this separate unit.