Subject: Re: WiRED: Lisp and Smalltalk on "Endangered Species" list From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 13:39:07 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3233396346813703@naggum.net> * Lars Brinkhoff | Let the flames torture my ignorant soul, but why is a single namespace | braindamaged? (I ask this out of genuine curiosity.) People invent Hungarian notation to deal with the multiple meanings of homographs in single-namespace languages. There's your evidence that not only do we intelligent humans already manage to deal with homographs and homonyms and homophones just fine, context is a Good Thing. (Coarse- grained context is also much better than fine-grained context simply because there is room for fewer coarse-grained ones.) Consider the names people would have if they had to have globally unique names. That is what a single namespace does to programmers. Add a perverse limitation to the number of letters there can be in a name, too, and you have basically reinvented languages like C. And of course you need _case_ to distinguish a stream from Stream from a STREAM. So much evil follows from the decision to have one namespace that it is hard to imagine that it can be the single source. People will look to the nearest evil and denounce it while they happily employ another, rather than rid themselves of the greatest evil: The one namespace to rule them all. -- In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none. In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief. 70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.