Squeak and Namespaces

Göran Krampe goran at krampe.se
Thu Nov 30 10:18:58 UTC 2006


Hi!

> Hi all ...
>
> one thing I really love in Smalltalk after programming years in different
> languages (and since
> 1996 in Java) is the simplicity and the really straight concept. One point
> is, that I don't have
> to deal with imports (or my IDE doesn't has to deal with it), I just wirte
> the class name and it's
> OK. All I need is in my image. Oh, yes, many of those classes have a
> little prefix of two or three
> chars, but who cares? That makes it allways clear, which implementation I
> use. So even in
> VisualWorks I use my TLAs as prefix, it makes live more simple.
>
> Adding namespaces adds complexity, a litte one, but it does. Smalltalk
> would loose a piece of its
> advantage.

I agree 100%. That is very much my own feeling but I went ahead and
thought "Can we still do *something* that actually maintains this
feeling?" and that is how I came up with my solution.

In practice most things would just continue to feel and look like before.
You can still create classes *without* prefixes. You can still use
packages using the old prefixes. There are no new tools needed, and no
complicated models to learn - everyone can learn that ok - if you used
class names like "WAComponent" before you can now instead use
"WA::Component" and you get a few nice advantages. Easy.

And there are no imports and there are no multiple contexts. IMHO it only
improves on the situation that we *already* have - prefixes.

If you haven't read it:

     http://swiki.krampe.se/gohu/32

regards, Göran




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