Namespace macros (was: Generators (iterators) for Gnu Emacs)

[Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Dec 07 2014, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> I don't know Stefan's motives, but would love to see actual namespaces
> in Emacs Lisp.  The closest thing I've seen is
> https://github.com/Bruce-Connor/names which can be installed from the
> GNU ELPA.  Perhaps that's an actual problem we keep ignoring because
> it's easy to hack around it "just that once."

Thanks for the pointer.

I also wrote a namespace macro: https://github.com/ellerh/namespace.el
Another one I know is: https://github.com/chrisbarrett/elisp-namespaces

The experience with my own namespace macro was that it works fairly well
when writing a library from scratch, in particular when the code
consists mostly of functions and almost no quoted symbols.  If it works
well, then the code looks a lot neater with namespaces.

But it was also rather useless when I tried it to use it with the SLIME
codebase.  The existing code uses prefixes in inconsistent ways and
quoted symbols are needed surprisingly often.

This may also be a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: if the existing
code can't be used with those namespace macros than nobody will use
namespaces, but as soon as some important libraries can be used with
namespaces it pays of to use namespaces and we get more usable
libraries.

Helmut