what's so difficult about namespace?

[Xah Lee]

comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.perl.misc,comp.lang.python,comp.lang.java.programmer

2008-11-25

Recently, Steve Yegge implemented Javascript in Emacs lisp, and
compared the 2 languages.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/
http://code.google.com/p/ejacs/

One of his point is about emacs lisp's lack of namespace.

Btw, there's a question i have about namespace that always puzzled me.

In many languages, they don't have namespace and is often a well known
sour point for the lang. For example, Scheme has this problem up till
R6RS last year. PHP didn't have namespace for the past decade till
about this year. Javascript, which i only have working expertise,
didn't have namespace as he mentioned in his blog. Elisp doesn't have
name space and it is a well known major issue.

Of languages that do have namespace that i have at least working
expertise: Mathematica, Perl, Python, Java. Knowing these langs
sufficiently well, i do not see anything special about namespace. The
_essence_ of namespace is that a char is choosen as a separator, and
the compiler just use this char to split/connect identifiers.
Although i have close to zero knowledge about compiler or parser, but
from a math point of view and my own 18 years of programing
experience, i cannot fathom what could possibly be difficult of
introducing or implementing a namespace mechanism into a language. I
do not understand, why so many languages that lacks so much needed
namespace for so long? If it is a social problem, i don't imagine they
would last so long. It must be some technical issue?

Could any compiler expert give some explanation?

Thanks.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄