Re: "noweb-ref": Limiting scope of definitions?

[Eric Schulte <eric.schulte@gmx.com>]

Yu <yu_icq@gmx.at> writes:

> Hello!
>
> Scenario
> -----------------
>
>   * Maintain a potentially long org file as an appendix.
>   * In this appendix, many independent scripting tasks will be documented.
>   * Each such scripting task has similiar partial tasks, e.g. imports,
> "settings", ...
>
> In such a case, many independent scripts may contain a block
> "<<imports>>" or something or something to the same effect, i.e. an
> overlap of definitions could be avoided only by some sort of scoping:
>   (a) manually, e.g. by prefixing the names with a script-specific
>         string (e.g. <<task1-imports>>. While this is flexible (i.e.
>         allows reuse of code from other script), it also reduces the
>         readability of the NOWEB code).
>   (b) providing some sort of scoping, e.g. declaring definitions section-local.
>
>
> Implementation Idea
> ----------------------------------
>
> A simple implementation, maintaining the flexibility of the manual
> solution, would be to create a header argument like ":noweb-prefix",
> that effectively just adds a prefix to the noweb reference names (both
> in declaring the block (#+name, :noweb-ref) and in using it
> (<<name>>)), unless such a prefix is explicitly specified. This could
> then be set as needed, for specific blocks or subtrees (as property)
> or any mixture of such.
>
> A prefix would then be recognized by a delimiter string to be specified.
>
> This solution would also be downward compatible with existing files,
> as the syntax for recognizing a prefix would be relevant only when
> deciding whether to apply an explicitly introduced ":noweb-prefix".
>

This does seem like a good idea and a header argument such as
":noweb-prefix" is certainly the way to implement such functionality.

I'll add this to my long term stack.

Best,

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/