OpenEuphoria

Re: . or : for namespace?

• Posted by Matt Lewis <matthewwalkerlewis at g?ai?.com> May 06, 2008
• 701 views

Jeremy Cowgar wrote:
> 
> The above *does* err out. That error message is pasted from the actual output
> of that program.

That's what I get for not testing.  Thinking about it, though, it does make
sense, because the namespace is a symbol in the same scope as m.
 
> Now, also, please see my post: 
> 
> http://www.openeuphoria.org/EUforum/m20548.html
> 
> That will address the above example a little more.

I think you meant m20546?  Unless you've changed your name...

> 
> > So, what does s.m.n mean?  It could mean either s[1][3] or s[2].  I
> > suppose that we could disallow using a fully qualified reference with the
> > dot notation.  Frankly, I'm not big on this sort of dot notation, either.
> > I don't see anything wrong with using square brackets.
> > 
> > I think the dot notation would be best reserved for implementing some sort
> > of structured access/OO.
> > 
> 
> Let's dive into the example. Let's say we do have dotted structure access.
> What
> is it going to access? In your example above:
> 
> }}}
<eucode>
> ? s.m:n  -- {5,6,7,8}
> </eucode>
{{{

> 
> When reading this with . for structure and : for namespace.
> 
> "s" is a variable of some sort. Now, a variable can contain a namespace? That
> doesn't make sense. You are accessing a variable, so inside the structure,
> there
> can be multiple "n" variables that you have to prefix them with a namespace?
> That would mean:

There's a lot to hash out about what dotted access might mean.  Some have 
used a dot as syntactic sugar for enclosing something within square 
brackets.  I don't think that's a good idea.  I was just using namespaces
to qualify the subscripts.

So, I retract the error argument, since it's already an error.  But I
still think the distinctiveness of : vs . is enough to keep the : for
namespaces.

Matt