Give it a spin! Make sure you have the latest containers, unordered-containers, etc.
$ cabal update && cabal install modular-prelude-classy
$ wget https://raw.github.com/DanBurton/modular-prelude/master/ModularPreludeExample.hs
$ ghci -XRecordWildCards -XNamedFieldPuns ModularPreludeExample.hs
More details soon to come.
But try this:
ghci> let Module.Map{empty,insert} = From._Data_Map_
ghci> :t empty
You can install just modular-prelude if you don't plan on using the Classy module. But if you uncomment the Classy lines in that file, try this out:
ghci> let Module.Classy{..} = From._ClassyPrelude_Classes_
The right-hand side of the imports doesn't have to be that verbose.
Just use def if that suits you.
ghci> let Module.Text{length, filter, pack} = def
ghci> length $ filter Data.Char.isAlpha $ pack "Hello, world!"
Warning: apparently doing two "imports" of the same name
in the same ghci session may cause some strange error to occur.
I have no idea what the implications of this are yet,
but don't go trying to use this library in mission-critical code
until the record system extensions it relies on,
and the particular ways we are abusing them,
are more carefully inspected.
I believe this may be connected to the way that
I've punned "Module" to be the qualified name
for all of the modules. This appears to only be a problem
in ghci; using let Module.Foo{blah} = def in baz
always seems to work as expected in source files.
One of the important next steps for this library is going to be figuring out how to shorten that ghastly long import list. I'm thinking either TH, or a custom pragma that postprocesses your source files, adding the imports to them. But I'd really like this whole environment to be bundled and easily accessible, without having to copy/paste 40 lines of code.
I've currently modeled the "modules" after ClassyPrelude, though in the future I'll just include the entirety of the a module in its corresponding first-class representation. That could be a lot of manual labor, so it would also be nice to write some code to generate such first-class modules automatically. I asked a StackOverflow question about this, and got a promising answer, but I haven't yet looked closely at it. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11571520/reify-a-module-into-a-record