On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 23:00:53 -0800, Jeff Clites wrote:
> I think we shouldn't try to do any sort of cross-language unification.
> That is, if we some day have a Parrot version of Java, and in Perl6 code I
> want to reference a global created inside of some Java class I've loaded
> in, it would be clearer to just reference this as
> "java.lang.String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER", even inside of Perl6 code--
> rather than having to do something like
> "java::lang::String::CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER". Parrot itself would be
> completely ignorant of any concept of a separator character--these would
> just be uninterpreted strings, and "foo::bar" and "foo.bar" would be
> separate namespaces, whatever the language.
What about languages which have the same separator, such as '::' (perl5,
perl6, ruby) or '.' (java, python)? They are going to be unified either way.
> I think it's confusing to try to unify namespaces across languages, and
> doesn't buy us anything.
Without namespace unification, how else are you going to even specify
File::Spec from java, or java.lang.string from perl5? We can obviously
invent suitable syntax for perl6, so that it can cope with arbitrarily named
packages, but we don't have that luxury with most of the other languages we
want to support.
Then the question becomes, "What about namespace clashes?", which Tim has
already addressed.
--
Peter Haworth [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Perl 5's goal was to make easy things easy, and hard things possible.
We want Perl 6 to make easy things trivial, hard things easy,
and impossible things merely hard."
-- Damian Conway, _Linux magazine_ 2003-04
