The design of a module system for constructing and main- taining large programs is a difficult task that raises a number of theoretical and practical issues. A fundamental issue is the management of the flow of information between program units at compile time via the notion of an interface. Experience has shown that fully opaque interfaces are awkward to use in practice since too much information is hidden, and that fully transparent interfaces lead to excessive interdependencies, creating problems for maintenance and separate compilation. The "sharing" specifications of Standard ML address this issue by allowing the programmer to specify equational relationships between types in separate modules, but are not expressive enough to allow the programmer com- plete control over the propagation of type information be- tween modules.

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