Squeak and Namespaces

goran at krampe.se goran at krampe.se
Sat Dec 2 08:10:16 UTC 2006


Hi all!

Lex Spoon <lex at cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
> Just to toss in my votes:
> 
> 1) I am not sure that SM::Package is an improvement over SMPackage.
> It does not look like a large improvement, anyway.

Not sure what you mean with "improvement". Visually?
 
> 2) A general hierarchy is an improvement over one-level.  If you have
> a project with 1000 classes in it, then you need multiple namespaces
> within your project, and you want to group them under an umbrella
> identifier of your project.  Without hieriarchical names, you will
> have to invent a prefix for all your namespace names....

I actually disagree. I don't think you need multiple namespaces if you
have 1000 classes in the *same Project*. 1000 classes doesn't equal such
a large team in practice - perhaps 10 developers? Not that hard to keep
names unique IMHO. Remember that this isn't java - we don't need
"namespaces" just to organize our classes - we have Categories for that.

Squeak itself is more than 1000 classes and we haven't seen any real
issue in keeping the names within base Squeak unique, have we?

Finally - just because we allow Foo::Bar does not necessarily mean we
want to have a "real" hierarchy and allow Foo::Boo::Bar. In fact, I
would like to stay away from that and just use "buckets" - call it a one
level hierarchy if you wish. Again, we have Categories for organisation
- I don't see the need for having multiple levels of namespaces. And I
really would like to understand exactly what semantics people think it
has - it is not obvious to me as I have posted a few times now.

regards, Göran



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