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