Quick comparison of two Namespaces proposals

Michael van der Gulik mikevdg at gmail.com
Tue Sep 18 21:44:48 UTC 2007


On 9/19/07, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>
> On Sep 18, 2007, at 18:09 , Jason Johnson wrote:
>
> > Oh no, are people really so strongly for ::?
>
> I'm rather strongly against ".". And not only because the dot is
> already too overloaded in Smalltalk.
>
> Dot-notation is becoming ubiquitous in "pop CS" to the point where
> people don't even admit there are alternatives. In one German state
> teaching "dot notation" to kids is made mandatory by the school
> administration, ruling out the use of Smalltalk as a teaching
> language. I kid you not.
>
> Having it creep into Squeak would make this individual sad. If this
> means anything to anybody ;)


I'm sorry to hear that. If it gets in, I might send you a beer to cheer you
up.

Could you explain how the dot is overloaded in Smalltalk? Currently I'm only
aware that it's used for ending statements.

The fact that the dot notation (in the context of Namespaces, I assume) is
popular is quite important. If it  comes only with a small grammatic and
typographic cost, then in my opinion it's a good idea to keep things
consistent across languages.

What do other Smalltalks use? Could somebody knowledgable give me a quick
run-down?

Other programming languages:
Python - '.'
Java - '.'
C++ - '::'
C# - '.'
Erlang - ':'
Haskell - '.' (note 1)

Not a programming language
XML - ':' (?)
Filesystems - '/', '\', ':'.

(1)
http://bardolph.ling.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/dwww/usr/share/doc/haskell98-report/hier.pdf.gz
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