comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.perl.misc,comp.lang.python,comp.lang.java.programmer
2008-11-25 Recently, Steve Yegge implemented Javascript in Emacs lisp, and compared the 2 languages. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ http://code.google.com/p/ejacs/ One of his point is about emacs lisp's lack of namespace. Btw, there's a question i have about namespace that always puzzled me. In many languages, they don't have namespace and is often a well known sour point for the lang. For example, Scheme has this problem up till R6RS last year. PHP didn't have namespace for the past decade till about this year. Javascript, which i only have working expertise, didn't have namespace as he mentioned in his blog. Elisp doesn't have name space and it is a well known major issue. Of languages that do have namespace that i have at least working expertise: Mathematica, Perl, Python, Java. Knowing these langs sufficiently well, i do not see anything special about namespace. The _essence_ of namespace is that a char is choosen as a separator, and the compiler just use this char to split/connect identifiers. Although i have close to zero knowledge about compiler or parser, but from a math point of view and my own 18 years of programing experience, i cannot fathom what could possibly be difficult of introducing or implementing a namespace mechanism into a language. I do not understand, why so many languages that lacks so much needed namespace for so long? If it is a social problem, i don't imagine they would last so long. It must be some technical issue? Could any compiler expert give some explanation? Thanks. Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
