A little namespace "proposal"

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Thu Apr 15 00:03:59 UTC 2004


Hi Avi!

I am on IRC btw.

Avi Bryant <avi at beta4.com> wrote:
> On Apr 14, 2004, at 3:43 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
[SNIP]
> > If this does not hold, many tools would have to be made 
> > namespace-aware. This can be elegantly avoided when using the 
> > fully-qualified name as actual class name. I thought your original 
> > proposal did this?
> 
> Yeah, I'm with Bert.  Much better to have the "compatibility behavior" 
> go the other way - that is, rather than "virtualizing" the 
> SystemDictionary so that
> 
> Smalltalk at: #Fruits::Apple
> 
> is implemented with a two level lookup:
> 
> (Smalltalk at: #Fruits) at: #Apple,
> 
> you should instead virtualize the namespaces so that
> 
> (Smalltalk at: #Fruits) at: #Apple
> 
> does the fully qualified lookup:
> 
> Smalltalk at: #Fruits::Apple.
> 
> This requires *way* less modification of existing tools and code.

Yeah, maybe you guys are right.
 
> I, too, thought this was the idea all along.

Well, the operative word is *was*. :) It seems to me that the
modifications have been rather small but I am a bit stuck on the
SystemOrganization part, not sure what to do there.

But we will still have to go through existing tools and make them
suppress the Fruits:: according to some nice rules, right? Otherwise all
tools listing class names will make us go bonkers pretty soon.

regards, Göran



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