Comment by PMunch
6 hours ago
There is a direct connection, you just don't have to bother with typing it. Same as type inference, the types are still there, you just don't have to specify them. If you have a collision in name and declaration then the compiler requires you to specify which version you wanted. And with language inspection tools (like LSP or other editor integration) you can easily figure out where something comes from if you need to. Most of the time though I find it fairly obvious when programming in Nim where something comes from, in your example it's trivial to see that the error code comes from the errorcodes module.
Oh, and as someone else pointed out you can also just `from std/errorcodes import nil` and then you _have_ to specify where things come from.
When I was learning Nim and learned how imports work and that things stringify with a $ function that comes along with their types (since everything is splat imported) and $ is massively overloaded I went "oh that all makes sense and works together". The LSP can help figure it out. It still feels like it's in bad taste.
It's similar to how Ruby (which also has "unstructured" imports) and Python are similar in a lot of ways yet make many opposite choices. I think a lot of Ruby's choices are "wrong" even though they fit together within the language.