On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 11:22:09AM +0000, Rob Cliffe via Python-ideas wrote:
> What's wrong with "namespace"? None of the other names IMO convey the
> intended/suggested use nearly as well.
The problem with "namespace" is that the intended us is not as a
namespace, but as a dict using `.` syntax instead of `["key"]` syntax,
as in Javascript.
The normal use of a namespace is something that you *implicitly* lookup
names in, e.g. locals, globals, builtins. Whereas this is more of a
key:value store where the keys are restricted to identifiers and you use
attribute syntax to access the values.
I know there's a lot of overlap in functionality and semantics between
objects, namespaces and dicts, but generally speaking we don't talk
about an int being a namespace when we look up a method:
(47295).bit_length()
nor do we normally think of a dict as a namespace, unless it's the
backend data store of globals etc.
So we have the funny situation that *technically* every object is a
namespace, but the objects that we use as namespaces are usually dicts,
and we don't use dict attributes as the namespace names/values, we use
keys/values instead.
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