Extending OCaml's 'open'

Abstract

We propose a harmonious extension of OCaml's open construct. OCaml's existing construct open M imports the names exported by the module M into the current scope. At present M is required to be the path to a module. We propose extending open to instead accept an arbitrary module expression, making it possible to succinctly address a number of existing scope-related difficulties that arise when writing OCaml programs.