Re: CommonLisp namespace system (was Re: adding namespaces to emacs-lisp (better elisp?))

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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    They want to avoid having long names for symbols or name clashes for
    symbols.

Emacs provides lots of ways to type the long names with fewer
characters.  That is a better solution because it doesn't complicate
the meaning of code.

If people don't want to have shorter names appear in the code,
then I suggest a system of read-time aliases:

  (def-read-alias 'foo 'foo:bar)

would tell the reader to replace `foo' with `foo:bar':

  'foo => foo:bar

`:::' could inhibit the alias processing for the symbol that follows.

  ':::foo => foo

prin1 could detect the cases where aliasing occurs
and replace the expansions with their aliases, or use `:::'
to protect against aliasing.

A file could load read aliases by calling `load-read-aliases'.
For instance,

   (load-read-aliases "cl-read-aliases")

Eval from files and buffers would have to handle this form specially.
Compilation too.

In the case of reading from a buffer, Emacs would set up the list of
aliases and pass that as an argument to `eval-region'.  Emacs could
use that list of aliases to make various Emacs features DTRT with them.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
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