OpenEuphoria

Re: Euphoria Standard Library on UBoard

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Jul 29, 2005
• 519 views

Derek Parnell wrote:
> Robert, I'm going to sound rude here, so please forgive me. But are you just
> not listening
> to us?????? A number of times you have been told about the problem with
> namespaces.
> 
> I repeat it yet again.

You and Matt seem to be talking about the same problem and same
proposed solution. As you might recall, I was initially enthusiastic
about the solution, but later when it came time to actually implement
it, I realized that there were a couple of negative aspects that I hadn't
really thought of when it was first discussed, so I put it aside.

On January 31, 2005 I wrote:
>
>   1. The change was going to add complexity and subtlety to
>      namespace rules that many people already had trouble
>      remembering.
>
>   2. After porting thousands of lines of C code to Euphoria 
>      (i.e. the front-end), I had a couple of nasty cases where I 
>      accidentally declared a global variable in two different files.
>      No error message was given, yet I was updating two different
>      variables, not one. It took a while to figure out what was 
>      happening. Since the proposed change to the namespace rules
>      would increase the chances of this sort of bug going
>      undetected, I considered that to be a negative thing,
>      that would partially offset the positive effect of fewer 
>      spurious error reports.

For the time being, I'd like to leave the namespace issue on the back burner,
until we gather more information from people reporting actual, real-life
(as opposed to imagined or theoretical) namespace problems. Maybe later
we can take another stab at it. 

For some reason this feature has generated far more discussion than 
it deserves, given the small percentage of users who actually 
encounter symbol conflict problems.

Before implementing this feature, there was a full discussion
on this list of how it should work. I believe Derek, Matt, Irv
and many others were involved. I proceeded under the assumption 
that, while they may have preferred other designs, they did not 
see any obvious defects in this design.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com