Name spaces in Spoon

Keith Hodges keith_hodges at yahoo.co.uk
Sat May 27 00:15:00 UTC 2006


The solutions discussed here only seem to solve one minor naming problem 
rather than a proposal that could bring the community a powerful coding 
and problem solving paradigm.

I remember Dave Simmons talking a lot about namespaces. One of the 
benefits of his idea was that if namespaces apply on a per method basis 
then you have a strategy for solving the fragile baseclass problem.

If you import a class or framework module or whatever into the namespace 
that scopes your project and apply further methods bound to that 
namespace only to fix or tweak that class, you can do whatever you need 
without accidentally breaking anything for other clients of the said module.

Ruby and Javascript coders do this fixing tweaking all the time because 
they know that any additions to the "environment" (I always add eachDo 
iterator to Array in javascript) are limited in scope to the web page or 
script that they are writing. Module/Framework writers have to think 
about these things more carefully. It seems that  a most common way of 
achieving this is through half decent documentation (auto generated etc) 
that allows users of a framework to know what is there and what not to 
step on, and their tools may warn of such things at compile/load time. 
This doesnt really work for us since squeakers don't seem to bother so 
much with api documentation.

I was surprised to find that Laszlo defines graphical elements using xml 
and any <view id="myView"></view> such elements that have an id 
attribute results in a global being defined that you can access myView. 
This has to be the worst case scenario if I want to import or paste a 
component from someone else that may very easily clash. So there are 
still folks out there getting this really wrong.

just my 2p

Keith


		
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