[fpc-pascal] Re: How to avoid namespace name clashes after USES ?

[Marcos Douglas]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 11:05 AM, Sven Barth
<pascaldragon at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am 22.08.2012 12:37, schrieb Timothy Madden:
>
>> On 08/22/2012 09:57 AM, Marco van de Voort wrote:
>>>
>>> In our previous episode, Marcos Douglas said:
>>
>> [...]
>>>
>>>
>>>>> Requiring all functions to be allways fully qualified will make the
>>>>> most commom case worse than current implementation just to be better
>>>>> for the uncommon case. This is a step back, not forward...
>>>
>>>
>>>> Timothy Madden want this, not me. ;-)
>>
>>
>> This is necessary in order to guarantee thare can be no conflicts
>> whatsoever. No matter how many units you want to USE in your program, no
>> matter what versions of the units.
>>
>> It is not that bad, python uses that from the start. You must call
>> os.path.basename(), and there is not way for you to call basename()
>> directly (well, there is one, but they have taken special measures for
>> it, so no name conflicts are possible).
>>
>> But for this to work, I need a way to alias the importing module,
>> because not all units have a 2-letter name like "os", for example I need
>> something like:
>>   USES 'TrigonometricLibrary' AS 'trig' in 'pas/TrigonometricLibrary.pas'
>>
>>
>> Of course I will not remove the existing behavior for USES, that is
>> programmers can still say:
>>   USES charset, matrix, socket;
>> and they get the behaviour they know.
>>
>> But if the programmer says:
>>   USES charset AS cs, matrix AS matrix, socket AS socket;
>> than no symbols are made directly visible, and all of them need their
>> prefix now (one of cs. or matrix. or socket. ). These prefixes are
>> chosen by the programmer so thay may not create conflicts, as long as
>> programmer sticks to the new form of USES.
>>
>> If both forms of USES are intermixed, like
>>     USES unit1, unit2, charset AS cs, matrix AS matrix, socket AS socket;
>> than there is a chance that prefix cs will conflict with some unit1.cs
>> symbol (either now or in a future version of unit1, or unit2). In this
>> case I think it is appropriate to make the prefix "cs.", introduced by
>> "charset AS cs", to have precedence over unit1.cs. This is because the
>> programmer must use the prefix "cs." a lot in the program ((s)he has no
>> choice, since the prefix is the only way to access simbols from unit
>> charset).
>
>
> Feel free to extend the compiler with such a feature and provide a patch. If
> you give enough thought to it, provide enough tests and ensure that this
> won't influence old code too much the chances that your patch gets applied
> shouldn't be too bad.

I proposed this feature, a couple years ago, I said now again and got
the same answer: "Feel free to extend the compiler"  :(
I never worked with compilers so, I'm not the programmer for that
task, at first, sorry.

> If you don't implement it... well... it may sound harsh, but: there are
> already many (partly more important) features that we need/want to
> implement...

Well, I will continue waiting a couple of year...  :)

> Note: I definitely prefer your solution instead of a warning ;)

Thanks.

Marcos Douglas