Re-thinking imports

Global Script has a short import syntax that looks like this:

  import m.f; -- > 'f = m.f;
  import type m.t -- > type 't = m.t;
  import module m.n -- > module 'n = module m.n;

I quite like this syntax; it has the nice bonus that, if you do need a string of imports, by formatting them this way:

   import xml.parser.attribute;
   import xml.parser.cdata;
   import xml.parser.element;

you can alphabetize the import list by piping the entire code segment by M-2 on |sort. As an added bonus, this respects module names as well. This is fairly straight-forward to parse: take a name after the import keyword, check that it has multiple components, split it into a module name and a field name on the final component division, check that the field name is a valid function name, and store the module name and function name separately. This syntax really only doesn't work for two cases:

• Importing everything from a module, and
• Importing a qualified name from a module.

For the second case, we can just say the programmer can suck it up and write:

  'n.f = m.n.f;

For the first case, we can use the fact that spaces are never legal in identifiers to permit a syntax like:

  import m ..;