On 29.06.2012, at 16:40, Colin Putney wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 3:32 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> 
>> Or, do nothing at all. The new binding would simply be shadowed.
> 
> Ah, good point. That's a fourth option.
> 
>> Maybe aliasing isn't the best solution to resolve ambiguities?
>> 
>> What if there was no aliasing, but names would strictly be resolved in order of import? That is exactly as your implementation currently works, right?
> 
> Yes, although so far I've only imported Smalltalk, not other environments.
> 
>> To refer to a shadowed global, one would have to explicitly request it from its environment, e.g.:
>> 
>>        self environment: 'Magma' at: #Session
>> 
>> I like this better than aliasing because it shows what's happening when actually using it, not somewhere hidden at the import. It's even less magic :)
> 
> I don't like this at all. It's equivalent to a fully qualified class
> reference, ala VisualWorks Magma.Session or Göran's Magma::Session.
> Avoiding those is the whole point of this design. Environments should
> be invisible to the code inside them.

How is this different from having to use "MagmaSession", if the class is actually named "Session", in the Magma environment?

The code *has* to differentiate if it needs to use the same global from two different environments.

- Bert -

>> At least that's what I would strive for in an initial implementation. We can add bells and whistles later.
> 
> Yes, autoaliasing should certainly wait. As Andreas said, that'll let
> us see what aliasing strategies work well in practice. We can even
> hold off on manual aliasing until compiler and tool support is in
> place. (Not that aliasing is particularly hard to implement.)
> 
> That said, I don't want give up the idea of a completely flat
> namespace from the point of view of application code. That's throwing
> the baby out with the bathwater. It should appear to Application, that
> the authors of Seaside and Magma got together and coordinated their
> class names so that there were no prefixes and no clashes.
> 
> Colin