Namespaces (was: Re: [ANN]A plan for 3.8/4.0... (insert drumroll here))

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Fri Apr 2 09:35:01 UTC 2004


> Got a fresh pointer?

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Research/Classboxes/index.html

> Anyway, I just get nervous when people start talking about namespaces.
> :) Not because the concept is bad in itself - but that I think we must
> do something different from the others in order to keep the "good
> values" of Squeak/Smalltak today.
>
> But it sounds like you are thinking along the same lines.

Oh yes. Let me say it clearly. I think that we should avoid to 
introduce ::
because once we will have that explicit cross namespace references then 
we will
have a big spaghetti mess.

Now we can have a transparent namespace mechanism if we want by having 
an explicit
import statement (that can be nearly computed automatically).

ClassBox B
	import: C from: A
....

Note that we refrain to have

ClassBox B
	import: C from: A as: Z
....

because we wanted to really understand the impact of alias introduction.

then the key question is the motivation of having namespace, I 
understand why andreas introduced
one in Tweak because this way he can happily live inside Squeak and 
select what he wants to reuse
before completely bootstrapping (if this is goal).
For some language experiments we would like to do the same: recreate a 
sqeuak kernel inside squeak.

For classboxes, our goal was to support robustness when I load you 
code? Now I can load your code without breaking my image even if you do 
dirty stuff and break the system in your classbox.
So for that we need a namespace but we wanted to make as transparent as 
possible.

Stef




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