I don't think you're missing something. The standards committee made a bad call with "no submodules", ran into insurmountable problems, and doubled down on the bad call via partitions.

"Just one more level bro, I swear. One more".

I fully expect to sooner or later see a retcon on why really, two is the right number.

Yeah, I'm salty about this. "Submodules encourage dependency messes" is just trying to fix substandard engineering across many teams via enforcement of somewhat arbitrary rules. That has never worked in the history of programming. "The determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language" is still true.

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bluGill 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The C++ committee tries to do features with room for future extension. They believe that whatever you want from sub-modules is still possible in the future - but better to have a small (as if modules is small) thing now than try for perfects. We can argue about submodules once we have the easy cases working and hopefully better understand the actual limitations.

	▲	groby_b 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not to put too fine a point on it: The world has 35 years of experience with submodules. It's not rocket science. The committee just did what committees do. And sure, "future extension" is nice. But not if the future arrives at an absolutely glacial pace and is technically more like the past. This may be inevitable given the wide spread of the language, but it's also what's dooming the language to be the next COBOL. (On the upside, that means C++ folks can write themselves a yacht in retirement ;)

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pklausler an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

FWIW, Fortran does have submodules.

	▲	groby_b 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I suppose we shall amend to "The determined Real Programmer will fix FORTRAN" ;) But, for the folks who didn't grow up with the Real Programmer jokes, this is rooted in a context of FORTRAN 77. Which was, uh, not famous for its readability or modularity. (But got stuff done, so there's that)