It's not that I disagree with the proposal, but in a way I mourn the
passing of simpler namespacing. It seems like the orthgonal namespaces
increase complexity of the run time, and part of me wants to see that
complexity managed by framework authors - i.e. using prefixed names
for reserved words so that layout becomes lzLayout. It's not that the
proposal is bad from a CS standpoint, but that it steepens the
learning curve of how laszlo works. It seems to me that telling people
that what names you see from inspecting a node is what populates your
namespace (like a typical object), not that some conflict and some
don't based on an implementation you don't see.
However this is just philosophy and not pragmatism. If this proposed
feature works stably and doesn't cause problems, it's hard to argue
against it.
-j
On Jun 2, 2008, at 8:38 AM, P T Withington wrote:
I think this is a good proposal, since it should actually be pretty
rare that you want to declare an attribute that ends up being one of
your child nodes.
On 2008-05-28, at 13:24 EDT, Henry Minsky wrote
Sorry my message got cut off before I could finish it:
This is a proposal in response to this bug, which came up when
someone named
a child view "layout", and got
unexpected results in a view.
http://jira.openlaszlo.org/jira/browse/LPP-5799
The current compiler behavior is that it will allow you to declare
a child
with the same name as an attribute,
as long as the attribute has a null default value. This unfortunately
applies to virtually every attribute
declared in the schema, so in practice you can easily shadow all
sorts of
important properties in
a view or node, by naming a child view with the same name as a class
attribute, with no warning from the compiler.
This proposal is that we add a new LZX attribute type, "node",
which you can
use to declare that
an attribute name can have the same name as child node.
So for example you could have
<class name="myclass">
<attribute name="titleview" type="node"/>
<handler name="oninit">
this.titleview.setAttribute('bgcolor', 0xcccccc);
</handler>
</class>
Then elsewhere you could say
<myclass>
<view name="titleview">
....
</myclass>
And the compiler would not complain.
The existing compiler behavior would be changed so that for any
attribute
type
except "node", if you name a child node
with the same name as that attribute, you get a compiler warning,
regardless of
whether the attribute was declared with a default value.
Henry Minsky
Software Architect
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
