I find the concept of locales really useful, and I did neglected to mention J paths. I think paths are a neat device, however, I have struggled to find good ways of working with them beyond a scripting "import", or via the OOP single inheritance "hierarchical" way of using them (a kind of piecemeal multiple inheritance is not that useful for me). I am keen to hear about other useful schemes that people have come up with.
Can I get away with saying that J locales are not hierarchical by default? ;-) Perhaps the J path scheme is too flexible to allow for meta based decorator pattern. That is, what assumptions could you make about the structures that you inspect and walk? In most instances, probably there's a simpler way to go about it. This is in line with Chris' comments: "... Back to J, I have never felt the need for nested names, though I obviously use them in Java and similar languages. Perhaps this is because J gets by with much shallower locale paths compared to more traditional languages." best, -Steven ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
