Re: CommonLisp namespace system (was Re: adding namespaces to emacs-lisp (better elisp?))

[Bastien]

Hi Nic and all,

Nic Ferrier <address@hidden> writes:

> They want to avoid having long names for symbols or name clashes for
> symbols.

You can have namespaces clashes too, it's purely conventional.

So to me the only complaint is about symbols' length.

But is that really such a big problem?

The common practice for Emacs Lisp seems to favor explicit and long
names over terse and hard-to-decipher ones.  I guess the length of
the symbols is more due to this (good) practice than to the length
of prefixes.

Personally, what I really like in Emacs Lisp is precisely the fact
that variables and functions names are available from the same and
unique global space.  When I read "org-x", it immediately tells me
where the variable is from, and I can use it as such from anywhere.

This is an advantage in terms of both discoverability and readability.

Maybe C-h a and friends can be clever enough to look up by taking a
namespace into account, but human-reading of the name of a variable
will not always be able to do this.

To sum up: I like the visual contextual clue you get with the prefix
and I'm not sure the length of symbols in *Elisp* is such a problem.

2 cts of course,

-- 
 Bastien