What are the primary theoretical difficulties with adding ML-style modules to Haskell?

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The main place to do the comparison is,

  • ML Modules and Haskell Type Classes: A Constructive Comparison. Stefan Wehr and Manuel M.T. Chakravarty. In Proceedings of The Sixth ASIAN Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems – APLAS 2008, Springer-Verlag, LNCS, 2008.

  • Modular Type Classes. Derek Dreyer, Robert Harper, and Manuel M. T. Chakravarty. In Proceedings of The 34th Annual ACM SIGPLAN – SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, ACM Press, 2007.

  • First class modules for Haskell, Mark Shields and Simon Peyton Jones. Submitted to the Ninth International Conference on Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages (FOOL 9), Portland, Oregon. 20 pages. Oct 2001.

I’m not actually aware of any theoretical issues — at least, concrete proposals have been made (and implemented in prototypes) — the Shields and PJ paper have a lot of the details. The implementation burden however, is non-trivial.

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