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Re: Some Dylan improvements
In article <agent_-826EAC.03003529032000@news.mindspring.com>,
Dustin Voss <agent_@mindspring.com> wrote:
>A naming convention of the sort Java has is A Bad Thing.
>Java uses two techniques to reduce collisions: corporate and personal
>names, and functionality.
>
>The former is clearly a hack. Look around, people. Companies break up,
>repurpose, change ownership, rise, and fall -- any one of which can
>result in a name change. People change their names, or take things they
>write and sell them or start a business around them -- and can no longer
>lay claim to their libraries. So once a library is named, it will keep
>the name forever, even if it is no longer relevant or accurate...or
>maybe each time ownership changes, the name will change, and it well
>seem like a completely different library, even though it's not.
I don't think this matters. What is important is to keep different
things different, not to uniquely identify each things. E.g., suppose
Gwydion and Harlequin had both produced a funky-stuff library:
Gwydion:funky-stuff Harlequin:funky-stuff
and that the Harlequin library got renamed during last year's shenanigans:
GlobalGraphics:funky-stuff
FunObj:funky-stuff
It would still be possible to use these libraries, without experiencing
name clashes.
If FunObj took over the Gwydion library, then they would have
to rename it somehow. But this situation is no worse than the existing
one, and much rarer.
If we all had to change huge amounts of our code every time a library
was renamed, that would be annoying. But this doesn't seem to be a noted
problem in real-life Java programming. It should be much less in Dylan,
because Dylan only uses library names in library files (a good decision).
>-- Dustin Voss
Dave.
References: