Re: Packaging, 2 last concerns

[Jamie Webb <j@...>]

On Friday 11 June 2004 19:50, Jamie Webb wrote:
> On Friday 11 June 2004 19:28, diego@tecgraf.puc-rio.br wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > > What you could be saying is that modules should not export variables,
> > > only constans and functions. (Or, as Asko wrote, they should be
> > > read-only.) There are lots of people who aggree with that idea.
> >
> > This is not really a problem with exported variables. It's a problem
> > with any context the library want's to keep, regardless of whether it is
> > exported directly, accessible through a method or not exported at all.
> >
> > Without imposing some kind restriction on how library functions are
> > exported, I don't think there is a solution for this problem (maybe
> > having socket:connect(...) instead of socket.connect).  I am not
> > comfortable forcing libraries *not* to keep any context either.
> >
> > Perhaps it's better to forget the lazy namespace instantiation,
> > unless you can come up with some way to do a deeper copy-on-write that
> > would copy through closures too (blergh).
>
> Why do you want to copy any namespaces other than the ones built into Lua,
> lazily or otherwise? Surely each module should be given a completely fresh
> environment and be expected to require any modules it depends on. I thought
> the agreed scheme (re-executing the module chunk every time the module is
> required) would work perfectly well in that situation and give each owner
> its own copy of any module internal state.

Or course, maybe I've just lost track of this discussion. Perhaps it's about 
time someone (Diego?) wrote the whole thing up on the Wiki.

-- Jamie Webb