Re: import and LuaBinaryModules

[Thatcher Ulrich <tu@...>]

On Mar 04, 2003 at 10:29 -0500, Doug Currie wrote:
> Tuesday, March 4, 2003, 8:31:14 PM, Thatcher Ulrich wrote:
> 
> > In a nutshell, the objection I have to these gymnastics is that they
> > don't solve the underlying problem, which is in order to avoid name
> > clashes, modules need globally unique names.  When you say:
> >         import "a"
> > The "a" needs to uniquely specify the desired module.  If someone else
> > in the world implements a different module named "a", you still have a
> > name clash, regardless of whether you can put the results of import()
> > in an arbitrary table.
> 
> I disagree, at least at the language level.
> 
> In your example, "a" is just a (part of a) file name. It gets turned
> in to "luaa.dll" by LuaBinaryModules, for example. A name clash here
> can be fixed easily by renaming one of the files, perhaps to
> "luaa-old.dll" and "luaa.dll" or putting them into different paths in
> the file system.

Yeah, that's a good point.  Nevertheless, if you want to, you can
still do:

      import "a.b.c-old"
      local c_old = a.b.c
      a.b.c = nil
      import "a.b.c"
      local c = a.b.c

But aliased module names is a pretty bad problem to have; packagers of
modules and distributions need to be careful to avoid it as much as
possible.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com