[fpc-pascal] dot within unit file name

[Vinzent Hoefler]

On Friday 18 January 2008 12:07, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:

>    It doesn't take a lot of intelligence to see that if unitname can
>    containe one (or more) dots, this mechanism becomes suddenly a lot
> harder because your unitname may, by accident, match
> unitname.identifier1 of a symbol in another unit.
>
> And doing all this in a way that doesn't change current behaviour...
> Not something you can do in a day, if you ask me.

The more important: What would the user gain from it?

Other than being able to write "unit1" and "unit1.extension" instead of 
a "unit1" and "unit1_extension"?

As namespaces were thrown into the discussion: The same scoping rules 
would still apply, so it's merely a "writing" enhancement, nothing the 
compiler could check or would enforce.

So, as far as I am concerned, putting effort into the development of 
such flat namespaces - which, while enforced by the developer only, are 
already there, but using underscores instead of dots - gain zero 
points, so I would be against it.

This is just too much effort for pure syntactic sugar.



Vinzent.