[ENH] Help for Adding Name Space to Squeak

Hans-Martin Mosner hm.mosner at cityweb.de
Mon Jul 26 07:00:00 UTC 1999


Alan Lovejoy wrote:

> And Namespaces should also each have their own independent Symbol Table,
> so that objects from different Namespaces can interact without possibility of
> conflict (Symbols from different Namespaces could then have the same
> characters, but still not be ==.  And it works for message selectors, too!).

What are the consequences in terms of readability?
I always thought that in Smalltalk, the meaning of statically bound identifiers
(classes, inst vars, static vars) should be determined in the static scope of the
method in which they appear, whereas the meaning of dynamically bound identifiers
(message sends) should be determined by the receiver object.
I can imagine a couple of code readability problems when the message #foo, sent to
an object of class Bar, means a totally different thing depending on the namespace
in which the *sending* method was compiled.
To some extent, this is true for the statics, too. But the 'explain' menu item
provides enough information to disambiguate definitions.

Hans-Martin





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