Packages - Concepts and Use

This report describes the package concept developed for the demands of the HPGP project. Our design borrows from similar concepts found in Java, C++, ML, or Ada but is strictly more powerful and we hope also more practical. In our concept, packages serve three main purposes: 1. Decomposing the global namespace into disjoint subspaces. 2. Distributing the program files into different directories. 3. Controlling the use of foreign packages. We achieve these goals by mechanisms for the explicit control of package environments that stem from the underlying directory structure but may be manipulated to determine each package's view of the world. On top of the package handling concepts, mechansisms for dependence control have been implemented; support for revision control is planned. Supportedby the Austrian Science FoundationFWF grant P11414- OTE "HPGP --- HighPerformance Generic Programming" y /projects/basic/hpgp/reports/97-1 CONTENTS 2 Contents 1 How to Avoid Further Reading 3 1...