"Göran Hultgren" wrote:
> 
> 3. Before throwing in Namespaces i Squeak though... Is it only me that
> feels that they really "get in the way" when programming Java? Import
> this and import that, oops, old imports laying about... Gah!
> 
> Of course namespaces are cool. And useful. But they also break the
> "modelessness" that Smalltalk has. You can always hack a oneliner in
> any of Smalltalks textareas (inspectors, debuggers, browsers,
> workspaces etc.) and just doit. The only context you have to think
> about is your "current obect" which is natural. But in Java I always
> have to qualify myself to death and it is truly annoying.
> 
> I glanced through Allan's PDF-document but I did not see any reference
> to how he thinks namespaces will affect our lovingly productive and
> effective Smalltalk environment and how we work with our code/objects,
> anyone have any thoughts? Allan?

I have the same reservations about most of the namespace proposals I
have seen introduced here in the Squeak list. Prefixing classes with a
(hopefully) unique identifier to prevent collisions is ugly, but I would
take that over the need to qualify everywhere. Unfortunately, I cannot
claim any great insight into what would be the Right Thing (tm) for
Smalltalk.

Perhaps some inspiration could be drawn from the "packages" defined for
CommonLisp. For the most part, they are reasonably unobtrusive in use
and solve essentially the same problem for a dynamic language of similar
scale and system complexity as Smalltalk.

-- Dwight