OpenEuphoria

Re: . or : for namespace?

• Posted by Bernie Ryan <xotron at bluefrog.?o?> May 05, 2008
• 691 views

ChrisBurch3 wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

  I agree with this - keep : for namespace signalling

Bernie

My files in archive:
WMOTOR, XMOTOR, W32ENGIN, MIXEDLIB, EU_ENGIN, WIN32ERU, WIN32API 

Can be downloaded here:
http://www.rapideuphoria.com/cgi-bin/asearch.exu?dos=on&win=on&lnx=on&gen=on&keywords=bernie+ryan