OpenEuphoria

Re: . or : for namespace?

• Posted by ChrisBurch3 <crylex at ?mai?.com> May 05, 2008
• 668 views

Derek Parnell wrote:
> 
> Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
> 
> > Now, following up with that there was another, new complaint, against the .
> > idea and that was by Mike and Matt agreed. 
> 
> My original obection was much the same too, by the way.
>  
> > Their comment was that when the see a : in code that they wrote 6 months or
> > 2 years ago that they will know it's a namespace and therefore the function
> > is in another location. That they will be able to tell that right away.
> > However,
> > maybe in 2 years we will have dot'ed sequence access (whatever that will
> > look
> > like) and then you will not know without research if greeter.greeting =
> > "Hello"
> > is assigning a variable name greeting inside of the greeter namespace or if
> > greeter is possibly a sequence.
> 
> 
> The main purpose of a programming language is to help people read programs.
> The two important words are "read" and "people".
> 
> > So, please read my prior post about the complaints against . and then the
> > above
> > and let's have another round of discussion please. If you are in favor or
> > against
> > it, please post your comments.
> 
> 
> Please retain ":" as the namespace delimiter.
> 
> 
> The colon provides an unambiguous visual clue for people reading source as to
> how they should understand the identifier preceding it. Remember that an
> intelligent
> editor is not the only way that source code will be presented to a person, so
> tooltips and colorization assists must not be assumed to be always present.
> 
> Without knowledge gained from other arts of a source code file, the following
> statement is visually ambiguous...
> 
>     if foo.bar = 1
> 
> What is 'foo'?
> 
>     if foo:bar = 1
> 
> Now it is obvious that 'bar' is declared in another source file.
> 
> The argument with respect to ease of typing can also be applied to other often
> used Euphoria syntax elements, such as the double-quote, tilde, dollar and
> brace-pair,
> not to mention the widely used '<', '>', '(', ')',  and '%' characters.
> But that argument isn't actively used against these characters so why use it
> against ':'?
> 

I agree with this - keep : for namespace signalling

Chris