Re: True Name Spaces, when?

Marco van de Voort wrote:
On 2008-02-17, L <L@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
The one thing I notice with turbopascal/delphi programmers is they don't even make use of dot notation and instead they name their procedures and functions uniquely per each unit.

Well, I think you see that wrongly. At least how I feel is that while I
avoid name clashes for certain much used identifiers, I don't automatically
prefix every function with e.g. an unit prefix, and I don't know any people
that do.

This defeats the purpose of unit namespaces altogether if one is avoiding
using unit.dot.notation. Example: the only time people use
unit.dot.notation in delphi code is if something is conflicting such as
system.lowercase vs sysutils.lowercase.

That's exactly what I meant. It is less worse to prefix a few very common
identifiers that to prefix them.

IOW, mandatory prefixing is worse than the current situation.

Rather instead of all the class/object bloat I see, many times people
could be making use of unit aliases.

The overhead of a class is a few bytes. The overhead of an object (TP style)
close to none. I hardly call that bloat.


I was not speaking of EXE bloat.

You always assume I come from a KOL bias view.. ;-)

I was speaking of this utter crap:

try
Sysutils:= TSysutils.Create;

finally
SysUtils.Free;
SysUtils:= nil;
end;

Rather, Modules.. ala modula or component pascal, or turbopascal.. are better solution. Because in some cases we do not need a class for general purpose public functions such as StringReplace() and Pos().

You know this...

I am patronizing you...

What I meant was that sometimes people abuse Delphi's class system because they do not have namespaces or unti aliases!

For example in Powtils right now, we have the problem of:

Format()

being inside the sysutils unit and the pwmain unit...

So I could change it to something ugly like:

WebFormat()

Which is silly... Instead this is better solution:

uses
sysutils,
pwmain as 'web';

begin
web.out();
web.format();
format() // calls sysutils one
// no mandatory required.
end.

Then if I update my web program to use the Powtils DLL:


uses
sysutils,
dynpwmain as 'web'; // dll version of PWMAIN

begin
web.out();
web.format(); // no need to change pwmain to dynpwmain
format() // calls sysutils one
end.

.