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Module System
The ECLiPSe module system has been designed to meet the following
criteria:
- 1.
- Be a structuring tool allowing to develop and maintain
large applications.
- 2.
- Avoid name clashes by having a separate name space for each
module.
- 3.
- Support privacy by allowing restrictions on the access
to certain information of a module.
- 4.
- Be incremental by giving as much freedom as possible
in the order in which the predicate are defined and re-defined and the
visibility declared and changed and by allowing the changes to be done
dynamically.
- 5.
- Be transparent to non-modular applications.
A Prolog program written in a non-modular system should run without
changes when put into a unique module.
These requirements make it clear that the main function of the module
system must be to regulate the access to certain (or all) Prolog
items. For instance, requirement 2 states that the module
system must be able to recognise that there are two items with the
same name, but used independently, and provide the means to restrict
their accessibility so that no conflict arises. The module system is
therefore concerned with the access to certain items. The main
task of the ECLiPSe module system is to control the access in such a way
that the above requirements can be fulfilled.
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1999-08-06