Question

I would like to give two .ml sources files the same name in different directories in my source tree, but the OCaml documentation states that the a file A.ml is exported as a toplevel module A = struct … end. If I have two files X/A.ml and Y/A.ml, how can I refer to them both from B.ml?

Answer 1

Modules can contain modules, i.e. you can have a hierarchy of modules.
From the B.ml point of view, you can see two modules named X.A and Y.A .
They can even both have a function named foo, those functions would be seen as X.A.foo and Y.A.foo .

Beware that if you open both modules X and Y, the module A from Y will hide the module A from X.

That was from the namespace point of view. Now, about the source tree.
One way would be to have those files:

• x.ml
• X/a.ml
• y.ml
• y/a.ml

The file x.ml is automatically generated and contains just this:

module A = struct
(*The contents of x/a.ml is included here*)
end

Likewise for y.ml
There are several preprocessors able to include a file: cpp, camlp4, camlp5, camlmix…

This set of automatically generated files (and regenerated each time the source changes) is not very satisfiying, I will look at other answers.

You can also have a look at ocamlc -pack, but when I tried it a long time ago there was a problem with ocamldoc unable to have x/a.ml and y/a.ml . So check this before you settle on a tool.