Am 03.04.2004 um 11:28 schrieb stéphane ducasse:
> The choice of andreas was how to support namespaces without impacting 
> the scope of the
> user with unnecessary symbols and preserving as much as possible as 
> the current environment.
> (I was driving late yesterday and I tried to understand what I wanted 
> to say in my idiot post). But the
> price is that you have somehowe explicit namespace or scope access. So 
> as a user I may see that there are namespace and refer to symbol 
> outside the world. (for me doing that what was I called programmer 
> audience vs a scripter would not have to worry or have the possibility 
> to use the :: operator).

Hmm, the funny thing about Andreas' approach seems to be that :: is no 
operator at all. It's simply part of the class name. So class Bar in 
namespace Foo just has the name #Foo::Bar. Indeed, "::" is a great 
choice here because colons can already be part of literal symbols.

In a sense, it's TSTTCPW. You already can define a class named Foo::Bar 
today (try it!). A little scanner modification makes Foo::Bar get 
recognized as one word. This lets you refer to the class directly 
(today you'd have to write "Smalltalk at: #Foo::Bar").

So without any "namespace support" I can define and use a class named 
"Foo::Bar". All current tools should continue to work. What the 
namespace support then adds is not much more than allowing you to use 
the short name "Bar" for "Foo::Bar" if you are inside the "Foo" 
namespace.

I must admit I like the simplicity of this approach a lot. And since it 
is so unintrusive, it should minimize conflict with more sophisticated 
techniques like classboxes.

- Bert -