Re: Packaging and importing

[Chris Marrin <chris@...>]

Rici Lake wrote:
> On 17-Aug-05, at 1:20 PM, Chris Marrin wrote:
>
> > I see it most often for "standard" things like Math.
>
>
> Indeed. I think math (not Math :) ) might be an exception here, since 
> you're probably not going to find sin, atan2 and PI [1] in other 
> packages (barring a multi-precision mathematics package, of course.)

I actually meant Math, as in the Javascript Math object which has a PI 
constant :-)

> One of the changes between Lua 4 and Lua 5 was the move of a huge number 
> of standard library functions from the global namespace into package 
> tables. On the whole, it's probably an improvement, since it avoids name 
> collision (the common alternative, often found in C programs, is 
> namespacing with prefixes: math_sin, bignum_sin, mortal_sin, etc.; which 
> can hardly be said to be an improvement on math.sin, etc.)
>
> But for casual users, particularly mathematical ones, it's annoying. So 
> one option is to dump the relevant package directly into the global 
> namespace, pretty much as you suggest. But I don't think the proposed 
> 'import' compile-time macro should be overloaded to do this; that's just 
> confusing. (I'm really putting the cart before the horse here, since 
> import is just a nebulous proposal based on an interesting but not yet 
> adopted parsing modification.)

To be clear, I am suggesting they be placed in the local namespace, as 
set by setfenv(). I don't like the idea of polluting the global namespace.

--
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