Hi all, I've read this thread about names clashes in toolkits etc. with quite some interest.
It would seem to me that, at least for the time being, the path of least resistance would rather be to make sure that names just don't clash, rather than try to devise various -very ingenious- schemes by which this can be avoided at load time. There would be several aspects here: 1 - There must be a way of maintaining a list of currently existing keywords, list which could be sent out to anyone interested. I'm willing to compile and maintain such a list, provided I'm supplied with the toolkits that contain these new keywords. Please note that this would only be a word list, without any reference of what these keywords actually do. I'd gladly have somebody else do it - any volunteers? Isn't there already somethinbg available (commercially?) that contains the names of many toolkits (Sbasic reference manual?). 2 - There must be a way of making sure that names, old or new, don't clash anymore. I would propose the following in this respect: When I (or somebody else?) get the toolkits and compile these lists, we can already single out the clashes. Whenever possible, the authors of the programs could be contacted, in an attempt to have the names changed by them. If the source code exists, that should be possible. That way, at least a list of potential clashes can be published. Th writers of future software could get the list (total words + clashes) from me, or I could push it into this list periodically, if needed. Please note that there is absolutely no way that I could enforce any kind of order, I could only give the already existing names to software authors, if they still wanted to reuse old names, I couldn't help it. A problem exists when only the toolkit exists, without the source (and the author can't be contacted). Surely it is possible to change the names of conflicting keywords directly in the file they are contained in, with a file editor (as a blatant case of advertising, Wined comes to mind). This is entirely feasible, but for copyright reasons, we couldn't release the new binary file. However, a small basic program that made the changes in the toolkit could be released... 3 - As a guideline, perhaps authors of future toolkits might want to envisage that they should, indeed, preface their extensions with, say, their initials, such as WL_ASEARCH instead of ASEARCH etc. This depends, of course, on your cooperation, but it might make future clashes less likely. What do you think? (And, finally, I had already renamed SEARCH etc in newer versions of the fie and am sending his direct to François). Wolfgang
