Namespaces: Technical proposal

Hi folks!

I had some PM discussions about the (presumably premature) death of ":"
as the namespace symbol.

Most people liked this, some liked "::" (which will definetely NOT work)
and then the opinion was very split with a lot of people saying "OK, if
it has to be" to ":::". Some folks even resigned and went for the widely
hated "". I'll recompile a table later this night with corrected
opinions (don't worry, I have redflagged all vote posts in my Thunderbird).

But now there might be a possibility to go with ":". Jessie will test
this out and I suppose he'll come out with results (hopefully positive).

Here's the idea: When the tokenizer encounters the opening "?" of the
ternary, it DEACTIVATES the namespace operator until the end of the
ternary. This way, all old code will behave as before, nothing will be
broken. Of course, this absolutely requires the use of parentheses if
one absolutely needs to use namespaces inside the ternary. As such cases
will be pretty rare, this is no big drawback. The good thing: no
whitespace magic is needed!

Comments?

OLLi

Oliver Grätz wrote:

Nope. Parentheses are a totally different thing here. Adding mandatory
whitespace means giving syntactic meaning to something that normally
never should have it. Meaningful whitespace is really evil. On the other
side parentheses are already there. They are an existing concept of
scoping evaluation. The idea simply consists of not having namespaces
inside the ternary:

while i agree that the () approach is less bad than the whitespace one
it is still "bad enough" from an language orthogonally point of view ...

--
Hartmut Holzgraefe, Senior Support Engineer .
MySQL AB, www.mysql.com

Just wondering. There's another thread about goto and labels running as
well. If they vote for something like:

LABEL:while (cond) {

}

Wouldn't this add another technical diffuculty with using ':' as a
namespace seporator?

Fortunately this is another new feature so there's no old code to break.
It's simply a matter of giving namespace:class precedence over label:expr.

Though yes, preventing that duality of meaning is a good thing.

-Sara