Squeak and Namespaces

J J azreal1977 at hotmail.com
Wed Nov 29 18:14:18 UTC 2006


My personal feeling on this is simply (as Step said) more research needs to 
be done on this.  It feels like just trying to stick on a band aid.  But 
this is less like a band aid and more like a tattoo.  Once you get 
namespaces in, it's going to be pretty hard to take them out again if 
research shows a better way.


>From: Howard Stearns <hstearns at wisc.edu>
>Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>To: The general-purpose Squeak developers 
>list<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Subject: Re: Squeak and Namespaces
>Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 09:32:41 -0600
>
>There's a heuristic that says incremental wins are good, but there are 
>cases that don't apply. ("The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in 
>power, no?") How do we know that this isn't leading the kind of "half a 
>loaf" (non-)solution that I tend to worry about?
>
>Guy Steele once told me that the first thing he tries to get right about a 
>language is the namespace. "Get that wrong and you'll never recover."
>
>I like Andreas' way of comparing what the proposal does to the cost of 
>programmer changes. Determining whether his analysis is correct depends, I 
>think, on what the proposal is actually doing, no?  I think it's possible 
>to implement it in such a way that changes scale appropriately, but it is 
>not yet clear to me that the code actually does things that way.
>-Howard
>
>Hernan Tylim wrote:
>>+1
>>
>>I like Goran solution. Its true that only  fixes the "prefix" problem  and 
>>not the "namespace" problem, as Andreas pointed out. But to me that is not 
>>a bad thing. its one step further to make Squeak a little more 
>>comfortable.
>>
>>Regards,
>>Hernán
>>
>>On 29 Nov 2006 15:59:41 +0100, *Lex Spoon* <lex at cc.gatech.edu 
>><mailto:lex at cc.gatech.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>     Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de <mailto:andreas.raab at gmx.de>> 
>>writes:
>>      > Generally speaking, I'm -1 on the proposal, mostly because what 
>>the
>>      > proposal doesn't achieve is to make a real step towards enabling
>>      > scalability of development (which to me is really what we're
>>      > after). That's because the *author* of some code still needs to 
>>find
>>      > unique names (prefixes) that do not conflict with the rest of the
>>      > world and that a "change of prefix" becomes very, very expensive
>>      > because it's literally like renaming all of the classes at once 
>>(and
>>      > consequently breaking all of the code that uses any name from that
>>      > "prefix space").
>>
>>     It's a good observation.  Nonetheless, a hierarchical global 
>>namespace
>>     seems a good step forward over a flat global namespace.  I do not 
>>know
>>     about *this* system, but in general I would love if global variables
>>     and classes had long hierarchical names.  Using the existing class
>>     categories would seem great for that.
>>
>>     Right now, responsible programmers already fake a hierarchical
>>     namespace by putting prefixes in front of all their global names.  At
>>     the very least, it would be nice to support this practice in the
>>     programming language.  Ideally, you can even use long names
>>     ("Monticello") instead of short prefixes ("MC") and thus greatly
>>     reduce the chance of conflicts.
>>
>>     In practice, I bet it's not so hard to pick prefixes that are unique
>>     in the contexts the package will be used in.  Most of the time, you
>>     can just use the name of the project, which you have surely already
>>     gone to some efforts to try and make unique.  If nothing else, all 
>>the
>>     open-source projects would benefit!
>>
>>
>>     Finally, keep in mind what the great naming systems you describe for
>>     the future would look like.  They will probably still have path-based
>>     identifiers!  The only difference from hierarchical names would 
>>likely
>>     be that the path can start from somewhere other than a single global
>>     root.  Thus, a flexible hierarchical-naming system would seem like a
>>     good basis for the kind of naming system you are thinking about.  (In
>>     particular, you would want Foo::Bar to really mean "Bar" within
>>     "Foo"....)
>>
>>
>>
>>     -Lex
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>--
>>Saludos,
>>Hernán
>>
>>
>>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>
>--
>Howard Stearns
>University of Wisconsin - Madison
>Division of Information Technology
>mailto:hstearns at wisc.edu
>jabber:hstearns at wiscchat.wisc.edu
>voice:+1-608-262-3724
>

_________________________________________________________________
Fixing up the home? Live Search can help 
http://imagine-windowslive.com/search/kits/default.aspx?kit=improve&locale=en-US&source=hmemailtaglinenov06&FORM=WLMTAG




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list